With over 150,000 members, Paris's Autolib’ electric car-sharing service has long surpassed its target of 80,000 sign-ups. And the success of the project has not gone unnoticed in London, where congestion and poor air quality continues to plague the population, as it does in the French capital.
The new London electric car sharing service will be operated by Bolloré, the French firm behind the Paris scheme.
Within five years it aims to have the same number of cars operating in the British capital as in Paris – 3,000.
The London cars will be painted in the same shade of red as the capital's buses, phone boxes and pillar boxes.
The enthusiastic uptake of the service in Paris has successfully cut polluting car journeys – but it has also encouraged more Parisians to buy electric cars themselves.
Electric passenger car sales have risen despite very low growth in the French car industry overall – where car sales rose just 2.5 per cent in Q1 2015 compared to the same quarter last year.
In the fourth quarter of 2013 there were 2,773 electric car sales in France, rising to 4,248 the same quarter of 2014.
In the UK, too, electric car sales have been on the rise – partly due to the availability of a £5,000 grant for those who wish to buy electric or hybrid cars.
Sales of plugins rose from 431 in the month of January 2014 to 1,715 in January 2015. Hybrid sales increased from 2,428 to 2,883 in the same period.
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