CleverShuttle – space for people
After years of thinking that car sharing would lead to less traffic and more free space by eliminating the need to own a car, a certain disillusionment has now set in. What is commonly understood by car sharing are “free-floating” providers that allow the customer to rent a car at point A and park it at point B again. These services are usually used in addition to owning a car. The car industry uses these offers primarily to test and present new models and providers such as Sixt take advantage of the business because they are used to managing large fleets. But whether I’m in my own car or in DriveNow, the biblical traffic jam on Leipziger Straße is no problem and it still took me what felt like an hour to get from Potsdamer Platz to Alexanderplatz.
The only sensible way to reduce traffic is to pack several people travelling the same route into a larger taxi. In South Africa, this is common practice. You simply flag down a taxi, tell the driver where you want to go and he will let you know whether he can take you without making a particularly long diversions or not. In Germany, this casual method was unimaginable until recently – until a few resourceful nerds came up with the idea that the driver’s mental arithmetic could be mapped by an algorithm that tells the customer how long the journey will take and automatically bundles the journeys.
Instead of “Ruftaxi”, the whole thing is now called “Ridesharing” and is currently the hot shit on the Berlin car sharing market, which is teeming with offers that claim to be the hot shit. The ride-sharing start-up CleverShuttle really is. And I was allowed to make the new image film for CleverShuttle.
Together with the equally bearded and great cameraman Baldur Eythorsson, I shot for two days in Berlin (co-directed by J.Reich) and captured the last moments of this, yes, it has to be said, great summer. The result is a pretty cool film for a very cool company.
