Carsharing or car sharing (AU, NZ, CA, TH, & US) or car clubs (UK) is a model of car rental where people rent cars for short periods of time, often by the hour. It differs from traditional car rental in that the owners of the cars are often private individuals themselves, and the carsharing facilitator is generally distinct from the car owner. Carsharing is part of a larger trend of shared mobility. Carsharing enables an occasional use of a vehicle or access to different brands of vehicles. The renting organization may be a commercial business. Users can also organize as a company, public agency, cooperative, or ad hoc grouping. The network of cars on the network becomes available to the users through a variety of means, ranging from the simplicity of using an app to unlock the car in real time, to meeting the owner of the car in order to exchange keys. As of January 2020 the world's top city for car sharing is Moscow with more than 30,000 vehicles (though in Moscow almost all carsharing cars are owned by large facilitators). History Early days The first reference to carsharing in print identifies the Selbstfahrergenossenschaft carshare program in a housing cooperative that got underway in Zürich in 1948, but there was no known formal development of the concept in the next few years. By the 1960s, as innovators, industrialists, cities, and public authorities studied the possibility of high-technology transportation – mainly computer-based small vehicle systems (almost all of them on separate guideways) – it was possible to spot some early precursors to present-day service ideas and control technologies. The early 1970s saw the first whole-system carshare projects. The ProcoTip system in France lasted only about two years. A much more ambitious project called the Witkar was launched in Amsterdam by the founders of the 1965 white bicycles project. A sophisticated project based on small electric vehicles, electronic controls for reservations and return, and plans for a large number of stations covering the entire city, the project endured into the mid-1980s before finally being abandoned. In July 1977, the first official British experiment in carsharing started in Suffolk. An office in Ipswich provided a Share-a-Car service for "putting motorists who are interested in sharing car journeys in touch with each other." In 1978, the Agricultural Research Council granted the University of Leeds £16,577 "for an investigation and simulation of carsharing".