A car has reappeared in a bay on Felsham Road, Putney, the first sign that Wandsworth Council’s scheme to replace Zipcar is being used.
It is a bookable hybrid from a company called Co-wheels and will be a welcome sight for those who have been without car sharing options since Zipcar left London. It is, however, just one car in a borough that used to have nearly 200.
Zipcar’s withdrawal in December left the borough with 122 empty car club bays and no operator willing to fill them at anything like the old scale. We reported that gap five months ago, noting that thousands of residents lost car club access with no confirmed replacement in sight. This is the first evidence since then that the council’s attempted fix is producing anything on the ground.
Co-wheels’ Basic plan has no monthly fee but charges from £7.45–£8.50 an hour or £55–£60 a day in London, plus mileage on top: 24p a mile for petrol/hybrid, 14p for electric. Its Standard plan, at £5 a month, cuts the hourly rate to around £5.50.
Zipcar, by contrast, bundled mileage into its price up to a set distance, with membership £9–£15 a month and hourly rates £7–£12 inclusive. For short trips Co-wheels can undercut what Zipcar charged; add mileage on a longer journey and the separate charge quickly closes that gap.
At its peak, Wandsworth had roughly 188 car club vehicles: 90 average daily Zipcar Flex cars that could be picked up and left anywhere in a zone, 87 more Zipcar cars tied to fixed bays, and 11 run by Enterprise. Between them they carried 175,000 trips a year. Today, Co-wheels says it runs six vehicles across the whole borough, one of them the MG3 hybrid on Felsham Road. Add Enterprise’s 11 and the borough has 17 cars doing the work that 188 used to do.
How we got here
The council’s answer to Zipcar’s exit was to make it cheaper and simpler for other operators to move in. Permit fees for new car club operators are waived until April 2027, and instead of negotiating a full contract with each one, the council now offers a lightweight Service Level Agreement: an operator pays a permit fee, gets accredited with the industry body CoMoUK, and reports its numbers back every six months.
Co-wheels is not new to Wandsworth. It launched here in 2015 with 10 vehicles, and was one of four operators, alongside Enterprise, Ubeeqo and Zipcar, in a 2017 partnership renewed the following year. Its reappearance on Felsham Road is a return, not a new entrant testing the borough for the first time.
That said, it is not really the same company: it changed hands in 2019, when Prime Advantage Capital Partners brokered its sale to a joint venture backed by SAIC Motor, the Chinese manufacturer that also owns MG, which explains the MG badge on the Felsham Road car. SAIC’s ownership drew separate, unrelated scrutiny this week: the Telegraph reported that a UK special forces base had barred Chinese-made electric vehicles over concerns their sensors could be exploited for spying.
What has changed is the old approach itself is ending. Wandsworth’s Contract Register lists just one live car club contract: one with Enterprise that has been running since August 2023. That contract won’t be renewed as the council moves to a service level agreement.
What this means for residents
For a Putney resident wondering whether a car club is worth trying again, the honest answer is: there is one car near you, and it might be the only one for a while. The next nearest Co-wheels vehicle is over a mile and a half away in Wimbledon Park.
The stakes go beyond convenience. Twenty-four development sites across the borough, including the council’s own Lennox Estate scheme in Roehampton, have planning permissions that assumed a functioning car club market at something close to Zipcar’s old scale. A borough with six vehicles is not that market. Residents in those developments, or anyone tracking how planning promises hold up, can raise the question directly with the council’s Transport Overview and Scrutiny Committee, the same body that signed off the fee waiver in February.
