Iris All Elektrick

Personal Cars are very unsustainable because of the use of materials (steel, aluminium, plastic and rubber) and also fossil fuel usage. Moving over to electric cars reduces the fossil fuel usage if the electricity is renewably produced but doesnt' address the unsustainble usage of materials for its production (2000 kgs per car on an average). The solution to this problem is moving over to sharing electric cars. Iris Elektrick is a stichting (i.o) that started 1.5 years ago with car-sharing in Irisbuurt, Eindhoven. Right now we are a group of 10 families (13 drivers) sharing two fossil- fueled cars. By our estimates we have reduced fossil fuel usage by 85% and material usage by 70% by moving from personal cars to shared cars. We do it at an affordable price of 35 cents/ km and no extra/ hidden costs. We make it affordable for everyone in the neighborhood for (shared) ownnership and use of cars while taking away the hassle of maintaining a costly car throughout the year. We have recently got subsidies from the Province (Noord-Brabant) and Gemeente (Eindhoven) to buy two 2nd hand electric cars to replace our fossil fuel powered cars. We are funding the buying of the electric cars by community investment (~75%) and subsidies (~25%). We are going to pay 2% interest on the community investments and will still be providing services at 35 cents/ km. As a community project we take some time to do it but ensure that we take the whole society with us and leave nobody behind in moving towards a more sustainable future. We have proven that communities can share cars by themselves, it's cheaper than owning cars and much more sustainable (reducing no of kms per driver/ year). We have reserved parking slots in the neighborhood and the right to put car-charging infrastructure connected to our own electricity meters. In the next step, we want to use community owned solar panels and volksmolens to charge our cars and become 100% fossil fuel free. In the near future it also opens the oppurtunity of the community taking control of the assets (cars, energy infrastructure such as solar panels, car batteries) and provide grid stability service to the public energy grid. In adiition to that, we want to replace parking spaces from our neighborhood and make them community gardens thus making our neighborhoods greener and more safer. We want to show that people can make personal sacrifices (by driving less) to invest in community projects and take control of it's own energy production and security, and sustainable neighborhoods.