Corporate Gentle Giants: Robin Chase of Zipcar

Robin Chase is out to change America, one car at a time

By Juliette Dominguez
Published: Dec 01, 2007

Even though Robin Chase is a transportation visionary and spends most of her life thinking about cars, she doesn’t give a hoot about driving them. She does have her driver’s license, but you’ll rarely find her behind the wheel. She prefers to walk.
Chase first made her mark on the auto world in 1999, when she founded Zipcar. The idea was simple—almost like a timeshare for cars. For a yearly membership fee, customers in major cities could pick up a rental car in their neighborhood, use it for the hours they wanted, and then return it to a parking spot for the next person. Chase soon had a rental fleet, complete with wireless technology so customers could locate the parked cars, and a simple reservation system. By 2000 Zipcar was available in several key cities. “This was what the internet was made for—sharing a scarce resource among lots of people,” says Chase. “I believed there would be a huge demand for this service, and I was right. All the parts snapped together.”

As Zipcar became a household name, in 2003 Chase decided to start GoLoco, a carpooling service that connects drivers with passengers for new-fangled carpools. “Zipcar worked well in dense cities where people don’t need cars to travel to work, but what about the rest of America?” asks Chase. “Most Americans spend almost 20% of their annual household budget on their car, they care about carbon dioxide emissions, but they had no options about lessening either of those.”

Chase had the “Eureka!” moment to start GoLoco when she was sitting in front of her computer, browsing Facebook. “You have to be a ‘real’ person to be on FaceBook as opposed to MySpace—there are checks and balances available. You can screen potential riders and riders can also rate the drivers. You’re in charge, and you make your own judgment as to who you do business with. Soon you’ll be able to hear the person’s voice, too. You can learn a lot from how someone sounds.”

On GoLoco.com, riders pay their share of the gas and tolls ahead of time, plus a 10% fee, which cuts out any I-forgot-my-wallet embarrassment for both parties. And since, let’s face it, it’s much harder to make new friends post-school, it might even forge some new friendships. “It’s a cool way to meet people—not just new people, but people who work in the same company or neighborhood. And there’s no particular demographic—we’re seeing all ages and genders using the service,” she says.

Chase is confident GoLoco will succeed where others have floundered. “Carpooling has this terrible 1950s image, and hitchhiking embodies the joys of the 1960s or the terrifying thoughts that parents like me think. So we wanted this to be totally new. GoLoco is the cool, smart, cutting-edge way to get around,” she says.

And beyond that, it’s much more friendly on the environment than everyone driving their own car to work. Helping the environment is one of Chase’s biggest motivations. “It means people don't have to wait for the government to introduce carbon taxes or congestion charges, or put in smart development or light rail or transit,” she explains. “Today, with the infrastructure we have, we can do something which dramatically reduces costs and emissions.”

Chase is happy to put her money—and her body—where her mouth is. She road-tested GoLoco on a recent trip. “I wanted to share a ride from Washington National Airport to a suburb 45 minutes away. I posted what I wanted, and a man responded to my email, saying he wanted to join my trip,” she says. “It worked like a charm—this man turned out to be attending the same International Wireless Summit I was and I knew the company he worked for. It was the perfect GoLoco experience and I got an environmental halo.”

Juliette Dominguez is the author of DIVING FOR AIR and has written for Glamour, Vogue, and the UK Daily Mail, among others. Check out her website www.JulietteDominguez.com.

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