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✅ Check-in at Greenwheels: Pon merges its sharing brands

On 19 October, Greenwheels and Check announced they are joining forces. From 18 November, users of either app will be able to book around 10,000 shared cars, vans, mopeds and e-bikes, and subscription prices will fall by up to 50%. Together the two brands claim 1.3 million customers in more than 200 municipalities. Both brands survive, but their staff will share a single headquarters and one tech platform. It is a move that is reshaping the Dutch shared-mobility landscape from the ground up.

Pon completes the puzzle

The move follows a reshuffle of ownership earlier this year. In February, Pon notified the competition authority of its plan to buy Volkswagen Financial Services’ 60% stake in Greenwheels, along with the remaining shares of Check, where a Pon affiliate already held a minority interest. The authority cleared the deal in March and concluded that competition would remain sufficient. Check co-founder Marco Knitel confirms that “both companies are now fully owned by Pon”, and that Greenwheels’ shares will be transferred to Check on 18 November. The deal closes a family loop. Check was incubated by Ponooc, the Pon family’s investment arm, and co-founder Paul van Merrienboer spent five years at Greenwheels before launching Check with Knitel, a former Uber manager.

Hoofddorp, the dress rehearsal

The integration is already being tested. From 21 October to 17 November, Greenwheels cars in Hoofddorp can only be booked through the Check app. Greenwheels customers log in with their existing credentials. Their accounts merge automatically and irreversibly, customer service moves to Check, and each participant receives €200 in driving credit. Check’s technology is becoming the shared backbone. “We have one backend platform, and we just keep two apps with different brand identities,” says Knitel. Hoofddorp users must download the Check app for the pilot. At the national go-live, Greenwheels customers will simply update their existing app, with an incentive to do so.

Two fleets, one offer

On paper, the two networks barely compete. Greenwheels is the incumbent of Dutch round-trip car-sharing. It ran about 3,400 cars in 191 municipalities at the end of 2025, more than a third of the 9,450 publicly accessible shared cars counted nationally. Each car has a fixed parking spot, and the network covers 195 railway stations. Check, by contrast, is an urban two-wheeler player. It runs mopeds in 21 cities, from Amsterdam and Rotterdam to Zwolle and Leeuwarden, and since September 2025 it has added 200 bikes in Amersfoort.

The only real overlap is in cars, and it is narrow. Check’s 200 or so all-electric cars run only in Amsterdam, on a “back-to-many” model: users can drive anywhere but must return the car to the zone they left from. These cars will be folded into a single fleet. Whichever app users open, they will see the same cars, shown as a Greenwheels or a Check car. In cities such as Rotterdam, a selector will switch between bikes, mopeds and cars. But there is no rush to rebrand. “It’s quite costly to rebrand a car, especially the old Greenwheels ones that are all red,” Knitel explains, “there’s also a lot of brand equity in the Greenwheels name, especially in areas where we don’t operate with Check.”. In Check cities, replacement cars will be white and carry both logos, starting with new electric Volkswagen ID. Buzz vehicles launching in Rotterdam. Elsewhere, Greenwheels brings national reach and the station network, while Check brings density and short urban trips. “Not every trip needs the same vehicle,” says Van Merrienboer, Check’s Managing Director together with Marco Knitel.

The economics of scale

Behind the pitch to users lies a cost logic, and the new pricing is its clearest sign. From 18 November, the mid-tier subscription drops from €10 to €5 a month (-50%) and the top tier from €25 to €15 (-40%). Greenwheels will also adopt Check’s weekday logic. Cars are available all week, but demand peaks at weekends, so weekday rates will be around 10–15% lower, and kilometre bundles will bring discounts of up to 30%. “We will only have to maintain a single platform, which obviously saves a lot of money,” says Knitel. He sums it up: “Because of this merger, you can lower your prices and we can renew the fleet faster.”

Profitability remains the industry’s sore point. felyx was sold to Cooltra for one euro in 2024 after some €80m of investment, and GO Sharing’s bankruptcy left around 4,000 scooters stranded in Hollands Kroon. Check says it has been profitable in recent years. Integration costs will weigh on 2026, but Knitel expects the group to be profitable on a normalised basis this year and once the transition is complete. “We believe sustainability comes from profitability,” he says.

Doubling by 2030

The partners are aiming for more than 20,000 shared vehicles by 2030, counting cars, mopeds and bikes together. Rail is a key lever. According to Van Merrienboer, Check is the only shared-mobility operator that business customers can pay through NS business cards. Companies use their mobility budget for Check and Greenwheels trips, and receive a single invoice that covers train journeys alongside shared cars, mopeds and bikes. With one IT platform, there is now only one API to maintain. For private users, the NS app currently offers only a deep link to the operators’ apps, so the next step is to bring the B2B offer to the B2C market. The government is equally keen on joint alternatives to car ownership. Eindhoven used a public concession to bring its shared bikes and mopeds into one app. Pon is getting to the same place through ownership: two roads, one destination.

🏙️ City Perspective #2 - Eindhoven: multiple operators, one contract

In City Perspective, we hand the mic to the public authorities shaping Europe's shared-mobility markets. After Nantes, we head to Eindhoven (NL), the first city to hand a single MaaS provider — umob — responsibility for all its shared bikes and mopeds. We spoke with Adriaan Karsmakers, Smart Mobility Advisor at the City of Eindhoven, six months into an eleven-year concession.

Could you start by telling us about your role, and what “sustainable shared mobility” means in practice for Eindhoven?

I'm a policy adviser on smart mobility for the City of Eindhoven, with a particular focus on shared mobility. Like many European cities, we're densifying fast, which puts real pressure on scarce public space — accommodating every service, including mobility, the conventional way would need several times the space we have. Our direction is set out in the Mobility Masterplan 2050. Shared mobility isn't a goal in itself; it's one of the instruments we use to keep the city accessible and livable while reducing the need for every household to depend on a privately owned vehicle…

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