The Secret Lives of Zipcar Drivers

Fleura Bardhi believed what many of us do about members of car-sharing services like Zipcar. They care about the environment. They want to take cars off the road. They’ve created a trusting community to share assets that previous generations insisted on owning. This is all a very European notion, and it made sense to Bardhi, an associate professor of marketing at Northeastern University originally from Albania.

"It was one of those situations where we both drank the Kool-Aid on collaborative consumption, on sharing," she says, referring to colleague Giana Eckhardt, an associate professor at Suffolk University. The two have since conducted new research on Zipcar drivers that calls this narrative – and the broader idea of collaborative consumption – into question.