Bankruptcy: Eloop stops e-car sharing

Five years ago, Eloop started its car-sharing service in Vienna with 20 Teslas, and in the years since that has expanded the fleet to 200 cars. Due to the significant increase in interest rates and high operating costs, the company must now file for bankruptcy, it said in a press release. Car sharing operations will be discontinued.

Serious damage to the vehicle fleet

“Unfortunately, we cannot continue this service under the current economic conditions, although we still believe that car sharing is the future of urban mobility,” explained Leroy Hoover, managing director and co-founder of Eloop. It is essential to have as dense a network of vehicles as possible to achieve profitable operations. However, in recent years, operating costs and interest rates for fleet financing have also risen significantly.

In addition, Eloop has had to deal with an increasing number of severe vehicle damages and overall losses in recent months. Some users “handled the vehicles negligently,” Hoover said. These have proven to be very costly for us, and there have been instances where accounts have been transferred. The costs of repairing the destroyed vehicles were borne by Eloop.

Coding as the new mainstay

Eloop now wants to focus on the coding platform. This allows digital shares to be purchased in a physical item. Previously, this was also possible with Eloop cars: anyone who purchased a token received a share of the sales. Eloop wants to offer this technology as a service to other companies in the future.