The first subscribers to the Communauto car-sharing service will undoubtedly remember a time when you had to fill out papers by hand to indicate the mileage traveled with the car.
What they know less is that for a few years, the company’s customer service was, to say the least… personalized!
“Communauto, hello! »
This voice was that of Benoît Robert, who answered calls from customers in the middle of a lake, on vacation.
“I was one of the rare people people saw with a cell phone. Hey, the big Motorolas? I was so excited! », he said before bursting out laughing.
Times have changed. From a service launched with three cars in Quebec (“I couldn’t wait to have 10,” said Benoît Robert), today we have nearly 6,000 cars bearing the company logo, which will soon have 30 years.
Sitting at a large table in the Communauto premises, rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest, Benoît Robert is inexhaustible about his company and his team.
Earlier, he says that he likes to surround himself with people who are better than himself. Then, he praises his early partner, Claire Morissette, an “activist in the bicycle world”.
“I admired her, I was flattered that she wanted to work with me,” he says.
You have to constantly bring him back to talk about himself a little.
“My nature is to stay in the shadows,” admits the man who nevertheless has an undeniable sense of communication and a frank laugh that rings out at all times.
He nevertheless recounts that when he was a teenager, in Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville, a suburb of Montreal, his father would not lend him his car.
“Since I was a teenager, I have traveled by bike, by public transport or on foot. If I wanted to come to Montreal, I was always by bike,” says Mr. Robert.
Then he continues, talking about his “little trips” at the time to Quebec, Toronto, Plattsburgh.
Really ? All those miles on the bike?
Yes, by bike. And when we travel a lot by bike, says Benoît Robert, we realize that “the fewer cars, the better”.
This outdoor enthusiast still wanted to have access to a car, from time to time, to get out of the city.
It was through research that he discovered that there were services in the world that resembled what he had in mind. A car that we could borrow only when necessary. Since it doesn’t exist here, he creates it.
“I started this, I was 29 years old. My friends were placed left and right, had real jobs. I continued to live as a student for a long time,” says Benoît Robert.
Communauto will soon be 30 years old and employs nearly 200 people. We even find Communauto cars in France!
Not bad for a “left-wing idealist” who had “great prejudices against businesses”.
Benoît Robert is now at the head of a profitable company, which buys other companies to have control, for example, over their technologies. Does he see himself as a role model?
My goal when I launched Communauto was to change behavior. I wanted to influence the evolution of society.
Benoît Robert, founder of Communauto
Competitors came and quickly left (we will remember Car2Go). Communauto remains.
“I think Communauto has a role to play in being the guardian of car sharing. It is not because we claim to be doing car sharing that the result will be of the same value in urban planning and environmental terms,” says Benoît Robert.
“From day 1, this is what I had in mind. »
Who is Benoît Robert?
- Born in Montreal in 1964
- Holder of a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Quebec in Montreal and a master’s degree in land use planning and regional development from Laval University.
- Appointed in 2022 to the Order of Canada “for his contribution to the development of the car-sharing industry and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions”.