fractional-car-leasing
(2)
Upshift
Upshift is a San Francisco car subscription service for people who drive a few days a month but don't want the cost and hassle of owning a car. Members pick a flexible monthly plan, get a clean late-model hybrid (Toyota Prius or Corolla Hybrid) delivered with insurance, maintenance, and refueling included, and skip parking tickets, repairs, and long-term loans. Founded in 2012 by Ezra Goldman and Ayako Hiwasa, the company frames itself as 'the ownership alternative for low-mileage city drivers' and is positioning for an autonomous, connected, electrified future of car non-ownership.
Ezra Goldman
Ezra Goldman is the co-founder and CEO of Upshift, a San Francisco-based company reinventing how city dwellers access cars. Rather than owning or leasing a vehicle full-time, Upshift members subscribe to a car that appears at their door when needed and vanishes when they don't - a fractional model that eliminates insurance headaches, maintenance costs, and the guilt of a depreciating asset sitting idle 95% of the time. Goldman brings 25+ years of shared-transportation obsession to the role, starting with a communist-themed campus bikeshare in 1999, through an MIT master's in urban planning, a PhD stint in Copenhagen studying why Danes ride bikes, and stints at City CarShare and ReachNow before building Upshift into a platform backed by MINI (BMW), Ford, and thousands of crowdfunding investors.