To promote sustainability in car hire, DIZ has taken two initiatives. Now it is possible in the 'traditional hire', when somebody hires a car for one or several days, to hire an electric version. You can also register at Amber and use one of its electric shared vehicles for part of a day.

Since 2018 TU/e has had a contract with Driessen car hire. In the past six months there have been 160 hires, all of them with cars running on fossil fuels. As of October 1 it will be possible to rent a sustainable variant in every class. In the mini class there is a Citroën Zero, in the middle range a Nissan Leaf and in the upper middle range a Nissan NV 200.

Twenty cents per minute

At the same time a pilot is started of an e-mobility startup of TU/e. Amber allows TU/e employees to use BMW i3 cars for short runs in the region. This will make the campus, or, to be more precise, the car park near the Auditorium, the next hub in the Amber network. That is to say a permanent staging area for their cars. Already there are hubs at HTC, Flight Forum, ABN AMRO and Fontys in Eindhoven, Fontys in Tilburg and the Amsterdam Zuidas. One hundred TU/e employees can register for participation in the pilot. You can do so via a colleague with authorization for Oracle iProcurement. If you do not know who they are, just ask a secretary or a DFEZ employee from your department or service.

At Amber you pay for the time of your ride, twenty cents per minute. As soon as you park at an Amber hub, the time stops running. “If you drive for less than four hours, and/or less than one hundred kilometers, a shared car from Amber costs you less than a car from Driessen”, says Angela Stevens, contract manager at DIZ. “The idea is that you can rent a sustainable car ad hoc, for short assignments. So you don’t need to take your own car to work, but can just make use of public transport or your bike.”

Test day for e-driving

Anyone who is not familiar yet with electric driving may feel a threshold, as DIZ policy officer Simone Vonken knows. That is why on September 20 there will be a test day on which cars from Amber and Driessen will be available at the Auditorium. “Then you can practice charging and make a test drive”, says Vonken. The cars can be used between 11.00 and 14.00 hours. “We hope that lots of people will show up to take a look around their lunch break.”