Portland will lose its latest car-sharing service at the end of the month.
Free2Move announced that it will pull its free-floating fleet of Jeeps from Portland roads at the end of November. The service, owned by Jeep manufacturer Stellantis, arrived in Portland in June 2021.
Free2Move rents cars by the minute. Its customers can pick up the cars wherever they’re parked and leave them at their destination, so long as it’s within the company’s 20-square-mile service area. Portland lost its last major car-sharing service of the type in October 2019, when Car2Go left the city. (Free2Move bought Car2Go in 2022.)
Dalyce Semko, a spokesperson for Free2Move, said Portland wasn’t as profitable for the company as some of its other markets, such as Washington, D.C. The company will continue to rent out cars in Portland on a monthly basis.
Zipcar still offers on-demand rentals in Portland, but unlike Free2Move and similar services, users are required to return the cars to the same place from which they picked them up.
The Portland Bureau of Transportation welcomed services like Free2Move, celebrating them as a way to help residents reduce their dependence on car ownership and cut down on traffic congestion and pollution. It issued permits allowing the cars to use most street parking without time limits or meter fees for up to 24 hours.
PBOT spokesperson Dylan Rivera called the news of Free2Move’s departure “unfortunate,” and said Portlanders had taken more than 175,000 trips via the car-sharing service since it launched.
Rivera said the city didn’t make any financial investments into the service, but adapted its rules to allow Free2Move to pay a reduced parking permit fee and fee per ride.
He said the city would remain open to other car-sharing companies.
The company had its share of hiccups. Earlier this year, a driver reported a hit-and-run by a Free2Move car and said that the company failed to pay her claim or cooperate in identifying the driver, prompting questions about the city’s lack of oversight for car-sharing services as well as the company’s vetting of its customers’ driving history.
Semko said such issues did not factor into the company’s decision to leave Portland.
—Jayati Ramakrishnan; jramakrishnan@oregonian.com