A new site for your green car search
14 Jul 2008
Seizing the urgency of an environment-friendly economical fuel, a French entrepreneur has launched a free site to advertise vehicles that run on alternative fuels.
Claire Bertin, a 31 year-old mother of two, who had tried in vain to hire an electric car for her personal use but could not find any information on the internet from where to hire one, finally decided to launch the free site, www.2et4rouesvertes.com.
The site excludes all vehicles running on petrol or diesel.
Bertin, who has worked with a Paris-based car rental, hired a webmaster to set up her site discreetly and as quickly as possible before some ine else did.
In order to do this, the resident of Taillan-Medoc, a Paris suburb, received governemnt assistance through the Assedic mechanism set up to help budding entrepreneurs. The site went live three months ago and Bertin has set aside around three hours daily to update it. She posts the information on the website from a variety of sources including the classified pages of other media, especially the mainstream ones, which also help her to attract ads to the site.
The site provides information on cars for people with a variety of preferances at prices ranging from €1,000 for a Twingo running on LPG to a hybrid Lexus that for €52,900 euros. Each vehicle, usually accompanied by a photograph, is classified into four different categories. 'This largely depends on whether it is electric, hybrid, LPG or biofuel,' Bertin says reiterating that her idea was inspired by the urgency to protect the environment and also promote fuel efficiency.
Nevertheless, Bertin admits that choosing what ads to host on the site is not always an easytask. Only recently, she declined to post ads for a four-wheel-drive LPG and a Porsche running on bioethanol, because she felt they consumed too much fuel to be regarded as eco-friendly.
Currently, Bertin's site, which is still young in the business, is receiving over 3000 hits per day and has a list of more than 200 environmental vehicles, while a dozen sales have already been made. For now, the website is far from turning a profit and Bertin, who has invested over €6,000 of her own savings in it, is still working for free. But the young woman, who demonstrates a genuine concern for the environment, is placing her hopes in the future. She continues to hope that the site will soon attract advertisers, such as automakers and she has also plans to ask car dealers to pay.
In the meantime, she is working on the development of a new version of the site, which will place ads by region, mileage and budget. But while the new version is set to be up and running in a few days, the young environmentalist is already busy with another project: a site on a European scale, in by making available in German, Italian and Spanish languages by September.
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