A second Co Wheels car is arriving in Putney next week, in the old Zipcar bay on Charlwood Road, near the junction with Norroy Road. It takes the operator’s total in Wandsworth to nine vehicles.
Co Wheels says more cars can follow, but the pace depends on residents actually signing up. It’s one of three new cars going into the borough this round, and the company’s own economics explain why growth happens car by car rather than all at once.
It follows the single car that arrived on Felsham Road in July, Co Wheels’ first return to the borough since 2015. The other two new cars are going in near Clapham Junction station and in Richmond town centre.
Add Enterprise’s 11 vehicles and the borough now has roughly 20 shared cars, against the roughly 188 it had before Zipcar withdrew from London in December 2025. Residents felt the scale of that loss most acutely in February, when the council admitted it had no confirmed replacement.
Robert Schopen, Co Wheels’ partnerships manager, says the slow return is deliberate. “The average owned car is used less than 3% of the time in a 24-hour period, so it is idle 97% of the time,” he said. “For a shared car to be sustainable it needs to be used around 25% of the time, and once it is used 50-60% of the time it’s effectively unavailable except during the night when there is little demand, so between 25% and 40% is where you would look to add extra cars.”
Getting there needs members. “To get that level where it can break even it needs around 30 active members per car,” Schopen said.
Why cars come in twos and threes
Co Wheels clusters its vehicles in groups of two or three, a 10-15 minute walk apart. “For people to have the confidence to give up their car, or give up their second car, and rely on a car club, they want to have a backup option if their nearest car is booked,” Schopen said.
He also pointed to a specific gap in Wandsworth. “We have quite a few dormant members who joined us pre-Covid when we were in the borough, and many existing members in London signed up to use our cars in other locations in the UK, so the challenge for us is to make them aware we now have cars where they live,” he said.
Two dozen developments built on that assumption, including the council’s own Lennox Estate scheme, still rely on a functioning car club market.
Co Wheels charges from £7.45 to £8.50 an hour on its pay-as-you-go plan, or £55-£60 a day, in the same rough range Zipcar charged before it left. Cars are booked through the Co Wheels app, and new members can use the code WELCOME50, a public offer via CoMoUK, for £50 of driving credit.
The other two new cars, at Clapham Junction and Richmond, go in the same week. Whether a third car follows in Putney is, on Co Wheels’ own account, largely down to how many residents sign up.
