Towns (CEOs Yunjin Choi and Jonggyu Jeong) announced that it will participate in the ‘3 Seoul Mobility Show’, which will be held at KINTEX for a total of 31 days from March 4 to April 9.
Towns’ first sharing service, ‘Town Car’, a regional sharing economy platform company, is the only peer-to-peer (P2P) car sharing service in Korea, and has been designated as a special case for the ICT regulatory sandbox in 2021. Town Car is a car sharing platform that provides convenience of transportation to neighbors and profits for car owners by sharing idle vehicles owned by individuals. It is currently operating in the eastern region of Gyeonggi Province (Hanam, Namyangju, and Guri City).
Town Car, which will be introduced at this exhibition, is a ‘neighborhood car sharing’ service that registers a vehicle owned by an individual on a platform and rents it to neighbors. The key is to provide vehicle owners with rental income and users with convenience in transportation through town cars. Town Car integrates everything necessary for vehicle sharing, including reservations, payments, and insurance, as well as vehicle management and delivery, and accident response, so that individual rentals can be carried out smoothly.
Through Town Car, users can conveniently use their neighbors’ clean vehicles at a reasonable price, and owners can earn additional profits from idle vehicles that were being wasted. In addition, it has various advantages, such as simultaneously resolving various social problems such as chronic parking difficulties in high-density areas such as apartments and officetels, public transportation accessibility issues, and environmental pollution.
A Towns official said, “Unlike abroad, where sharing between individuals is active, car sharing between individuals has never been attempted in Korea due to related regulations. “Towns has officially started its business through the regulatory sandbox system and has been working to develop technology to provide a higher level of safety and comprehensive vehicle management services than existing mobility businesses in order to resolve regulations,” he said.
In particular, Towns added that it has been developing a variety of user identification and authentication devices in terms of technology and service operation, with user safety as the top priority. Through this, we are actively responding to social issues that occur in the car rental industry, such as accidents caused by minors and uncertified customers. As a result, we have been operating our business without accidents and disputes for over a year since the launch of the service.
Last January, Town Car received additional relaxation of sandbox verification regulatory conditions in both the exposure range of registered vehicles and service area. Based on this, we are speeding up service verification and plan to expand the business throughout Gyeonggi-do starting in the second quarter.
Through this exhibition, Towns plans to inform more people about the nascent concept of individual car sharing and its value. In addition, we aim to provide benefits that town car owners can experience by partnering with various services throughout the vehicle life cycle, including automakers. It is expected that this will serve as an opportunity to become more active in car sharing between individuals by providing a higher level of service to neighbors who use town cars.
An official said, “If the Town Car so far has confirmed the possibility of car sharing between individuals in the country, the top priority is to establish a technological and cultural foundation so that more people can share personal cars with peace of mind in the future.” He added, “With high inflation and high interest rates, “As both demand and supply for personal vehicle sharing will grow in the future, we will strive to create a standard for personal vehicle sharing that is a win-win for all users,” he said.
Meanwhile, the 2023 Seoul Mobility Show will be held on the theme of ‘Sustainable Connected Mobility (Sustainable and Intelligent Mobility Revolution)’ at KINTEX Exhibition Hall 1 in Goyang-si, Gyeonggi-do, starting with Press Day on March 3 (Thursday) and ending on April 30 ( days) to be held. The total exhibition size is 4㎡, more than twice as large as the previous event (9㎡), and more than 53,541 companies and institutions from 26,310 countries around the world will participate to showcase various mobility contents.