Suffolk Council to launch community car club across the county

Suffolk County Council have announced that they will be running a trial of electric community vehicles which is set to launch next summer. The tender process will begin this autumn.

As part of the Plug in Suffolk project, the car club will see 16 EV being made made available across eight locations in Suffolk which can be booked by the minute, hour or day. 

The locations are expected to include Ipswich, Bury St Edmunds, Newmarket, Sudbury, Needham Market, Stowmarket, Lowestoft and Woodbridge.

Members of the public interested in this project are urged to sign up to the mailing list to receive updates as the project progresses – Plug in Suffolk Car Clubs – Mailing List.

A report published earlier this year by shared transport charity Collaborative Mobility UK (CoMoUK) revealed that people who join car clubs cut their total driven mileage by 153 miles per year.

It calculates that each car club vehicle operating in the UK last year replaced 26 privately-owned cars, equating to an overall reduction of 116,339 vehicles, freeing up 134 hectares of road space across the country, close to the size of London’s Hyde Park.

While successful car clubs have been operating in other pasts of the UK for years, Suffolk have found that current providers are reluctant to fully fund electric community vehicles in rural and semi-rural areas like Suffolk as there is no real evidence that they can be run profitably.

The project is funded by Suffolk’s public sector organisations, helping deliver on two of the Suffolk Climate Emergency Plan’s goals; a reduced number of cars on the road and an increased proportion of vehicles on the road that are low or zero emission. Additional charge point funding is being provided by the Department for Transport’s On Street Residential ChargePoint Scheme (ORCS).

Councillor Neil MacDonald, Chair, Suffolk Public Sector Leaders, says: ‘Suffolk residents have been asking about the possibility of bringing Car Clubs to Suffolk following the recent success of the Car Club trial in Oxfordshire, therefore I am looking forward to the launch of our trial.

‘I am hoping that many individuals and families will benefit from the scheme and help to bring electric community vehicles permanently to our county.’