The idea of car sharing, where multiple paying members of an organization have hourly access to a scattered fleet of ready to go vehicles, is a really great idea for cutting down on car pollution. That being said, the fleets of these car sharing entities are in some ways only as green as the vehicles in them, which thus gives San Francisco Bay Area based City CarShare a strong leg up via the fact a large amount of its vehicles are making use of green technology.

City CarShare recently announced it had added two new Ford Focus Electric vehicles to its car sharing fleet, bringing its total green tech car number up to 178. This is broken down to include 160 hybrids, 13 plug-in hybrids and five all-electric cars, giving the nation's largest non-profit car sharing organization a mix of vehicles that are 44 percent oriented towards cars with close to or straight up zero emissions.

City CarShare Ford Focus Electric (image via City CarShare)

Though it didn't break down specifically how this happens, City CarShare noted its fleet "prevents 80 million pounds of co2 from entering the atmosphere each year." Its move into greener cars comes as a recent survey of its members found many wanted electric and hybrid vehicles as a transportation option, with the top why factors including being curious about the technology, environmental reasons and to reduce petroleum or fossil fuels.

Current plans call for City CarShare to add 15 additional all-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles next year. The hope is to have half of its fleet be electric or hybrid by 2015. Current cars besides the new Ford Focus Electric vehicles include the Nissan Leaf and Mitsubishi iMiEV; the Chevrolet Volt and Toyota Prius plug-in hybrids and the Honda Civic, Toyota Camry and Toyota Prius hybrids.

Besides City CarShare, other car sharing outfits offering electric or hybrid cars to their members include Zipcar, Autolib and car2go.