#71 Slavko Bevanda, Chief Product & Technology Officer, Necture
In this episode of the Wunder Mobility Podcast, Gunnar Froh speaks with Slavko Bevanda, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Necture and one of the most experienced operators in European car sharing. Slavko spent five years as CPTO and later COO at ShareNow — the merger of Car2Go and DriveNow and still the largest free-floating car sharing operator the industry has produced — before running technology and operations at Digital Charging Solutions. Today, he leads the team behind Necture, the Vienna-based intelligence and execution layer that sits on top of operators' fleet management platforms. The conversation opens with the metrics that don't make it onto conference slides. Slavko walks through what utilization rates actually mean in free-floating car sharing, where profitability really starts (somewhere between four and seven rides per car per day), what great looks like in cities like Berlin or Milan (seven to nine), and why the right walking distance to a vehicle — typically 300 to 500 meters — is more important than the car model itself. They also dig into pricing: minute and hourly rates, kilometer-based models, day-based rentals, drop-off fees, and the underrated economic impact of upsells like deductible reductions on operator margins. The second part zooms into Necture's product. Slavko explains how the intelligence layer ingests mobility data, mobile network operator data, weather, public transport hubs, events and app openings to break a city into hot and cold zones, predict demand 24 hours out within roughly 10–15% accuracy, and turn that into concrete actions: relocations, dynamic pricing and supply matching. He shares concrete numbers — revenue uplifts of 25 to 50% (and in some cases beyond) — and explains why Necture deliberately ramps up customers slowly to avoid cannibalising existing rides. Then comes the muscle: Street Crowd, the gig-based execution network behind the relocations, with thousands of users per city and fulfilment rates around 90%. The episode closes with a candid outlook on autonomy. Slavko sees teleoperated and autonomous vehicles becoming relevant at scale in two to three years, expects only a handful of brave operators to deploy them next year, and argues that car sharing operators are far better positioned for the autonomous era than the industry currently gives them credit for — they already know how to manage fleets, handle maintenance, and verify customers at the door. A grounded, operator-to-operator conversation about what really moves shared mobility today, and what to prepare for next.
