Around 80 hybrid, electric, and petrol vehicles, belonging to Antwerp-based mobility company Poppy, are available to rent in the Walloon city of Liège from Tuesday, Le Soir reports.
Poppy already enjoys a sizeable presence in major cities across the country, including in Brussels, Antwerp, Mechelen, Ghent, and Belgian airports. From Tuesday, the new Poppy vehicles were parked in various locations around Liège’s city centre, as well as in some areas in the outskirts such as Sart-Tilman, Rocourt, and some parking lots.
The company says that it plans to further expand its coverage within the city in the future. Poppy’s expansion is good news for carsharing in Liège, where Cambio vehicles already service much of the city.
“The particularity of ‘free-floating’ is that it allows users to leave the car in a predefined area, there is no constraint of having to start the journey at a point and come back to it,” Sylvian Niset, CEO of Poppy Mobility, told Le Soir.
Vehicles are available to find and rent through the Poppy app. The system charges users according to price per minute, hour, or day. Fuel, parking, insurance, and maintenance of the vehicles are included in the price paid by the customer.
For the City of Liège, car-sharing makes it possible to accelerate the decline in personal car-ownership, helping to slash the city’s emissions and air pollution.
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Against the backdrop of high petrol prices, car-sharing services are becoming increasingly popular across the country. At the end of 2022, the amount of kilometres travelled by carpooling vehicles almost doubled, compared to the year before.
In January, German car sharing service Cambio announced that it experienced record growth last year, use numbers rising from 6,000 to 9,000.
