The two Zipcars brought to campus this year cost the Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA) about $760 in November. The WSA, which is covering the discrepancy between the profit collected from student Zipcar members and the cost of the Zipcar program for its first year, had predicted that the program would cost a maximum of nearly $4,000 per month.

Although the WSA cannot reveal how many students have signed up for the Zipcar program due to their contract with Zipcar, Chair of the Finance and Facilities Committee of the WSA Ben Firke ’12 said that the program seems to have caught on quickly.

“It’s going well, especially for a new program,” he said. “Whenever you start something new, it always takes a while to catch on, but people seem to be responding well.”

The WSA presented two cost scenarios to the administration last year, one predicted that the Zipcar program would cost about $19,000 over two years and the other predicted that it would cost about $30,000 over the same period of time.

“We’re performing basically ahead of the projections that we had last year, which are considered to be the better-case scenarios,” Firke said. “If things continue the way that they’re going, this year we’ll probably spend between maybe five and seven thousand maintaining the program.”

For the 2010-2011 academic year, the administration has agreed to share the cost of the Zipcar program with the WSA. Most colleges that join the program stop losing money after the first two years of program implementation.