As both the offer and the market for carsharing grow, a lot of technological progress is made to improve the carsharing service. Now that online reservation applications are a common good, smartphone apps are on the rise to check availability and make reservations (see for instance the screenshots from the American AutoShare app). To improve both user friendliness and safety, new technologies are being developed to access the cars. Most shared cars are opened with a smart card (e.g. AutoShare Keycard), but in some locations you can open a shared car with your cell phone ( e.g. City Car Club in Finland, Sweden and Estonia). For carsharing operators, advanced software is available to manage every aspect of the carsharing service (e.g. Mobisys by Mobility Switzerland).
There is also a major trend for introducing clean vehicles into the shared cars fleet. According to a recent research report, one out of five carsharing vehicles will be electric by 2016. The NICHES+ project developed some guidelines for using electric vehicles in city carshare schemes. The region of Paris, France, leads the way with its large-scale car sharing system called Autolib' (FR), to be operational in October 2011 (EN information here). The region imposed the revolutionary condition that all 3000 Autolib' vehicles should be electric cars. Another important asset of the Autolib' system will be the one-way service: as in the bikesharing s cheme Velolib', Autolib' users do not have to return their vehicle to the station they took it from. They can drop it off at any Autolib' station.