Five small sedans at the University of Texas at Dallas stand ready to deliver blows against the empire — as well as transport students on pizza runs.

Granted, “Pawn” the Prius and the others don’t look much like radical agents of change.

Additional Photos

Students take out a Honda Civic Zipcar from the UT-Dallas campus in Richardson, Texas. Zipcar, which went public in 2011, now serves 260 college campuses. It was founded 12 years ago in Cambridge, Mass. Photos by Steve Pfost/Dallas Morning News/MCT

Computer science student Ashwin Chan rents a Zipcar on the UT-Dallas campus in Richardson, Texas. Zipcar hopes to reshape the American culture of car ownership.

But the vehicles at UTD — two Toyota Priuses, two Ford Focuses and a Honda Civic — are part of a burgeoning national fleet of Zipcars that could dramatically reshape the culture of car ownership.

In Maine, Zipcars are available in Biddeford, Brunswick, Lewiston and Waterville, according to the company’s website.

CEO Scott Griffith proclaims that Zipcar is the “most important innovation in transportation in a generation.”

Instead of owning cars, Zipcar members pick one up from a neighborhood “pod,” drive it for a few hours or days and return it when they’re done — for as little as $7 an hour, including gas and insurance.

“For every shared car you put on the road, 15 are taken off,” said Mike Serafino, general manager of university programs at Zipcar. “We estimate members can save $600 a month by not owning a car.”

Founded 12 years ago in Cambridge, Mass., Zipcar is now on 260 college campuses. The company went public in 2011.

Zipcar has a fleet of 9,000 vehicles — most of them small, fuel-efficient cars with names like Freddy the Ford Focus or Pawn the Prius — and operates in 17 major markets, including Seattle, Atlanta, Chicago and New York.

Students pay $25 to join, and nonstudents pay $35 plus a $60 annual fee, Serafino said.

The rental rate at UT-Dallas is $7 an hour, or $66 a day.

College campuses, where parking is often extremely limited and cars are an enormous expense for struggling students, provide the nucleus for rapidly expanding Zipcar.

But where feasible, the company expands from campuses into surrounding urban areas.

In Los Angeles, for example, Zipcar started at USC and UCLA , growing into various neighborhoods such as Santa Monica and Westwood.

“The demand by members grew so large in L.A. that we opened an office with 150 cars,” said Serafino. “You’d be amazed at the range of our members there, from 18 to mid-80s.”

Although Zipcar seems serious about changing attitudes toward car ownership, that is likely to be a long process — at best.

“I see it more as a life-cycle thing,” said George Hoffer, a business professor at the University of Richmond who follows the auto industry. “Just as the minivan was to the soccer mom, the hourly rental could free the urban Y-er from the weight of a car.”

After customers sign up — they must have a driver’s license and be insurable — they are issued a Zipcard.

When they want a car, they go online to reserve it and are told where to pick it up. To get in the car, they wave their Zipcard over a sensor in the windshield, which unlocks the vehicle.

While the notion of sharing cars might seem downright odd, the company’s mostly young members are completely comfortable with it, Serafino said.

Many got clobbered by the recession and can’t afford cars.

In addition, the 20-something members of Gen Y have grown up sharing music and videos in their “on-demand” culture.

“Rapid access to things is very important for this generation,” Serafino said. “It started with TV and then moved to music. We call it collaborative consumption.”

Customers at UTD seem mostly motivated by economics, said Thea Junt, energy conservation and sustainability manager for the university.

“This is not some communal resource,” she said. “This is an economic resource.”

Membership has skyrocketed. The company says it had 673,000 members nationwide in 2011, up from 81,000 in 2006 — a 730 percent increase.

Meanwhile revenue grew from $31 million in 2006 to $242 million last year, the company says, up 680 percent.

While practical considerations drive many members, Zipcar CEO Griffith thinks the company can ultimately cool Americans’ love affair with cars.

“About half of Zipcar members sell a car or choose not to buy a car as a result of their Zipcar membership,” he told GigaOM, a technology media and research site. “That makes urban life more affordable for many, many people.”

Although mainstream rental car companies such as Hertz have sought to emulate Zipcar in some markets, new-car ownership is Zipcar’s main competitor, company officials say.

Last year, Ford Motor Co. became a partner with Zipcar in its university programs — a move the automaker doesn’t view as consorting with the enemy. It subsidizes $10 of the cost of the service to student members of Zipcar.

In the short term, Ford wants to know more about Generation Y (sometimes called millennials), a group bigger than baby boomers that tends to rely heavily on social media for communication.

“The millennials are a very difficult audience to reach, and their loyalty to brands is not as strong as other demographics,” said Ford spokeswoman Angie Kozleski.

By getting Ford products into Zipcar’s fleet and introducing young users to them, the automaker also hopes to leave a strong impression.

“We have found that when young buyers do decide to buy a car, they often consider a brand they are familiar with,” Kozleski said.

For now, Ford doesn’t view Zipcar as a threat to future sales — though the company acknowledges that millennials don’t seem as interested in cars as previous generations.

“Who knows what the millennials will do?” Kozleski said. “But we still think we will all at some point in time have to get a car.”

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