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 🚗 Filling Milan's Car-Share Vacuum

Milan invented Italian free-floating car-share. It also watched it collapse. In the span of eighteen months, the city lost most of its operators — and with them, thousands of vehicles that had become part of the urban mobility fabric. The tender published on 7 August 2026 is the city's attempt to rebuild. It is also a case study in what happens when car-sharing economics break down at scale.

Europe's most ambitious car-sharing market

Milan launched its first free-floating car-sharing service in December 2013 with Enjoy, ENI's mobility subsidiary. By the early 2020s, the city had become one of Europe's most densely served markets: in November 2022, 2,662 cars were in service in Milan in free-floating mode, of which 1,062 were electric — across four operators: Enjoy (ENI), E-Vai, Share Now, Leasys/Drivalia, and Zity.

The collapse was coming. Zity closed on 18 December 2025. From January 2026, Enjoy abandoned free-floating entirely, switching to a station-based model with rental and return only at Enilive service stations, airports, and railway stations. By mid-2026, the Municipality of Milan's own website acknowledged only two operators remained: Drivalia and Free2move.

In 2024, according to AMAT, shared cars generated nearly 8,200 daily rentals— already down compared to 2023. The direction of travel was clear before the exits accelerated. Profitability in free-floating car-share is structurally difficult: high insurance costs, vehicle depreciation, maintenance, parking disputes, and competition from ride-hailing all compress margins in ways that scale alone cannot solve.

What the new tender asks for

Published on 7 August 2026, the new authorisation framework sets out to rebuild the market on more durable terms. Key requirements: a minimum fleet of 200 vehicles per operator (or 50 quadricycles), authorisations running until 30 November 2030, and — the most structurally significant condition — full electrification mandatory by 1 January 2030. Until then, Euro-compliant combustion and hybrid vehicles under 100,000 km are permitted under a transitional regime.

The city is not subsidising the service. The model remains commercial — operators pay for access to the permit, bear the commercial risk, and set their own fares. What Milan is providing is regulatory certainty: a clear contract term, defined technical standards, and a framework that allows operators to plan fleet investment with confidence that the rules won't change at the next council meeting.

The electrification deadline is the defining constraint. Any operator entering the Milan market now must build a business case that works on EVs by 2030 — which means infrastructure access, charging logistics, and fleet economics that stack up at scale. Given that most European car-share operators have been electrifying their fleets progressively since 2020, this is achievable — but it narrows the field.

Car-sharing in Europe: a mode in search of its footing

Milan's experience is not representative of European car-share as a whole — but it is instructive. Across the continent, the market remains active and sometimes genuinely healthy. Miles in Germany has built a profitable, growing operation in Berlin and Hamburg. Poppy in Belgium has successfully combined cars, mopeds and scooters under a single app across Brussels, Ghent, and Antwerp. Free2move (Stellantis) and ShareNow continue to operate in multiple European cities. The mode is not broken. It is, however, acutely sensitive to local conditions.

What Milan illustrates is that car-share economics can collapse under the right combination of pressures. Assosharing confirmed that each vehicle was generating losses of over €400 per month — driven primarily by a municipal fee structure described as "by far the highest of any major Italian city," compounded by high operating costs and fierce competition from micromobility. Zity had 136,000 users and 1.7 million rentals to its name when it closed. The problem was never demand. It was the cost of serving that demand in a city that had made car-share structurally unviable.

The same operator can be profitable in Brussels and loss-making in Milan. The broader pattern across European exits — Share Now consolidating, Zity dissolving its parent entity Mobilize Beyond Automotive, Enjoy abandoning free-floating — points not to a failed mode but to a failed assumption: that free-floating car-share could sustain itself commercially in dense European cities without either public subsidy or a captive corporate parent absorbing the losses. The operators that have survived without either — Miles, Poppy — have done so by staying focused, keeping costs lean, and choosing markets where the regulatory and fiscal environment is not working against them.

Milan's new tender does not address the municipal fee structure that drove the exits. Whether that changes the calculus for potential bidders — who have to build a profitable service where five previous operators struggled — will be the real answer to what the city has learned from its own market's collapse.

 🌍 Two Wheels, Two Continents, Two Different Stories

The Fluctuo European Shared Mobility Index 2025 and NABSA's 7th Annual State of the Industry Report landed within weeks of each other, offering for the first time a genuinely comparable snapshot of two mature shared micromobility markets. The headline numbers are striking — and so are the differences.

This Top Story, featuring exclusive analysis and Fluctuo data, is now available exclusively to Premium subscribers. Upgrade your subscription to unlock this story and get access to our exclusive insights from next week onwards.

LAUNCHES & EXPANSIONS 🚀

Bird
Launch in Gap (FR) 🛴 & 🚲

Dott
Expansion in…

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PAUSES & EXITS ⛔️

AMCO
Pause in Chalandri (GR) 🚲

VAIMOO
Exit from Torre del Greco (IT) 🚲

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TENDER WATCH 👀

🟠 Expected & Rumoured

⭐️ Milan (IT) | 🚗 
◾️4-year licences to be awarded
◾️200 cars (or 50 microcars) minimum per operator
◾️Full electrification mandatory from January 2030

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CITY UPDATES 🌐

Barcelona (ES) | The 7 bike-sharing operators have reinforced their joint parking control operations.

Bremen (DE) | 40 scooters have been retrieved from the river.

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INDUSTRY NEWS 🗞️

⭐️Dott reports a 50% ridership increase in August in Rome (IT).
A telling result of Lime’s suspension… and the increase in fuel costs.

Bicing reports a 4% ridership increase last summer in Barcelona (ES).

Tyred launches AI-driven connected insurance to disrupt micromobility market.