Zipcar - The best new idea in business

Zipcar has already persuaded young urbanites to share wheels. Now the movement is going mainstream - and players like Hertz and Ford want in.

FORTUNE, September 14, 2009 — Scott Griffith enters the parking lot outside his office in Cambridge, Mass., pulls out his iPhone, and taps a button on the screen. Suddenly a yellow Mini Cooper starts honking like a crazed goose.

Griffith approaches the vehicle and taps the screen again. The doors magically unlock, and under the steering wheel the key dangles from a cord. He starts up the car — nicknamed "Meneus" — and drives away at a rate of $11.25 an hour.

Griffith is the 50-year-old CEO of the car-sharing service Zipcar, but he's also just one of the 325,000 members who rely on the company's handy, gassed-up cars to get around

Share My Ride

New York Times, March 8, 2009 — MY NEIGHBOR JOE EMBRACED THE ZEITGEIST, or was embraced by it, shortly before Thanksgiving a couple of years ago when he decided to bid adieu to his S.U.V., a two-and-a-half ton specimen that was a pain to park, got only slightly better mileage than a cement mixer and bore a brand name that meant to evoke, through misspelling, a famously resilient tribe of Berber-speaking desert nomads. Joe replaced the car, more or less, with nothing, or rather, with an Idea, which he carried around in his wallet on a plastic card, lawn-green, embedded with a computer chip and prominently imprinted with a playfully mellow looking “Z,” for Zipcar — an upstart company bent on altering the primal bond between Americans and their vehicles.

Small Company, Big Brand

BusinessWeek, August 28, 2006 — How small outfits build their brands into household names