Citee Car - Case Study

CiteeCar at a glance

CiteeCar profits from both the typical car rental benefits, as they own their own cars and set the prices, as well as from the community benefits of car sharing. Customers can rent a car by the hour, but the maintenance and parking of the car is taken care of by a peer “host”; a member of the CiteeCar community rather than a CiteeCar employee.

While rental locations for pickups and returns are set by CiteeCar, anyone who owns a parking spot can be the “host” and offer a parking space for CiteeCar customers. In this way, CiteeCar users get free parking spots all over the city, and “hosts” get free time to use CiteeCar. CiteeCar itself profits from this business model by offering low rental prices to their customers.

There are already over 600 cars (Kia Rios) in Berlin, Hamburg, München, Frankfurt and Ruhrgebiet alone. CiteeCar can also be found in Essen, Bochum, Gelsenkirchen and Dortmund.

The results

CiteeCar’s new iOS and Android smartphone apps are the most efficient way to utilise this car sharing platform. Besides offering the standard finding and booking of CiteeCar options, booking management and information about CiteeCar-stations, the app also offers a wider range of value-adding features.

These features include a “zoomable” map and information about the distance to the next CiteeCar based on current location, or you can track when there will next be a car available for you.

It also allows you to choose between your favorite cars, making it faster and easier for you to book a car. Furthermore, the app offers one-click-booking so that you can book your favorite car quickly.

Finally, the smartphone app offers other features such as account details for members, CiteeCredits status for CiteeHosts, reporting and feedback options and an embedded direct link to the company’s hotline.

One of our Concise Software teams worked for several months on this project, making sure that both the iOS and Android app would maintain the best possible quality and help this new German startup to satisfy the needs of their users and potential customers.

The CiteeCar app works based when communicating with an API client. Both apps have integrated Google API Places for storing addresses, as well as Google Tag Manager and Appsee for monitoring user activities. Parse.com is embedded in the app to coordinate the sending of notifications to the user.

However, there are some important differences between the Android and iOS app. While the Android CiteeCar app adapts Google Maps to interact with the user and controls localisation with Google API Directions, the iOS app uses its native MapKit for both features. The iOS app is also written completely in the SWIFT language and handles pin-clustering via an outside library.