On-demand ride sharing company Lyft has sold its peer-to-peer carpool service Zimride to car rental giant Enterprise.
Zimride currently provides its service in San Francisco, Los Angeles, DC, Lake Tahoe, and New York.
The acquisition amount was not disclosed.
AllThingsD reports that the main motivation of selling Zimride was to focus on the $83 million funded company Lyft. Some 90% of Lyft’s 80-person staff were dedicated to Lyft, not Zimride.
The acquisition by Enterprise follows that car rental giant Avis, which snapped up Zipcar earlier this year for $500 million.
US-based Zimride lets users post either their travel requirements (date, origin, destination, price) as a passenger or offer to drive the car.
Once the passenger submits a request, the car driver choses to accept or deny it, upon acceptance details of both parties are shared with each other.
User profiles of Zimride includes university and college students, as well as corporate communities.
Collaborate consumption in transportation industry is quiet popular in other countries as well. In countries like France, Belgium, Germany and Spain, car pooling has now become a viable travel alternative with hundreds of thousands of users.
Companies that provide similar service to Zimride include SFO-based Tickengo, Australia-based Coseats, Germany-based Flinc, Germany-based Cowag, Amsterdam-based Toogethr, Ireland-based Avego, Paris-based BlaBlaCar, the company that is expecting to transport 10 million people by the end of 2013, a number that is about three times the number of people it transported in 2012.
Technologies like GPS, smartphones and social media have been the major backbone behind many taxi-related startups. But, taxi regulators aren't fully convinced of this new model. Just last month, Los Angeles Department of Transportation issued Cease and Desist notice to three tech-enabled transportation startups - Lyft, SideCar, UberX.
Taxi regulations aren't stable only in the US, even in Asia the issue has become an interesting prism through which car sharing is evolving.