 |
| GM vehicles opened and started by phone: Maven City |
What is Maven Gig? It isn't Maven City, a more typical car sharing service that has already been launched in April of this year and is different from ZipCar, in that it unlocks and starts cars directly from a smart-phone app without any keyfob or membership, both needed in the granddaddy of car sharing, Zipcar.
Zipcar Baltimore has 250 cars on the street of all kinds of makes and models, at dozens of locations around Baltimore. Its rental rates range from $8 to $10 an hour for such cars as Volkswagen Golfs, Honda Fits and Ford Focuses, but there is also a monthly or annual membership fee of $7 a month or $70 a year that Maven doesn't have.
Maven Gig is the provider for workers of the gig economy: Slogan, "our car, your hustle". The hustle could be the wannabe driver who has no car but wants to provide Uber, Lyft or food supplying services. Now such a person can get a car from Maven Gig for a convenient weekly rate instead of the customary hourly or daily rate for car shares. In that it comes full circle back to traditional car rental.
 |
| Car share and the gig economy |
Interestingly, Baltimore is among a set of early deployment cities which so far include Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Phoenix and Washington. Not bad company, with Detroit as an exception. Or one can take Detroit and Baltimore as a sign that the old rustbelt city is well on its way as being seen as a cool place for innovation, regardless of the baggage these cities carry.
Folks who simply shrug off the whole sharing culture as nothing but hype, fashion and chatter of those who have nothing better to do than yakking about the latest trends, miss several important points. Co-working places, food hubs and transportation share models maybe a fashion that is potentially overrated, but they stand for a paradigm shift that can't be denied. They are simply "proof of concept" to stay in the innovation parlance, i.e. experiments on various scales.
Lets sort it out: Daimler (Car2Go), BMW (Reach Now-Sixt), General Motors (Maven and Mave Gig) and others got into car sharing when it was seen as the very next phase of urban mobility where owning one's own car wasn't any longer the most practical way of getting around.
Then came ride sharing via Uber and Lyft and took a lot of car-sharing's thunder to the point that Daimler and BMW found it hard to make enough money with their forays into their own car-sharing and even consider collaboration with each other. The next big thing just around the corner will be the autonomous vehicle (AV). Then car and ride sharing may become synonymous because the driver has been taken out of the equation altogether, obviously fundamentally changing the business model for both types of enterprises yet again. What could that next shift mean? This is where GM's Maven Gig seems to come in.
 |
| Zipcar also offers commercial fleet vehicles |
The gig and the hustle are here to stay as new forms of work. As fluctuating as the gigs may be, people engaged in working gigs can and must avoid the large investments that came with more permanent businesses such as multi-year rents for office spaces, company cars or fleets of delivery vans. When even traditional trades, such as construction and farming, increasingly rent equipment as needed instead of buying it, it makes perfect sense when traditional commercial rental begins to utilize the innovations of passenger car sharing. The innovation isn't the vehicle or the equipment itself or who operates it, but the method with which equipment it is deployed into the hands of those who need it to conduct business.
 |
| Daimler's Car2Go car share model is large and international |
When it comes to cars, vans, trucks and buses, the real revolution will be when sharing will be combined with autonomous driving. For the gig it will mean that not being a driver is at the core of the service but providing it via shared AVs.
It is still entirely unclear how it will play out. Obviously the big car manufacturers are betting that they need to be at the table early on. Their attempts in car and ride sharing are efforts to be a player when it isn't popular anymore to own a personal car.
Unfortunately, it isn't all that easy to make money from car sharing. General Motors has already learned some lessons in the past from working with traditional car rental companies like Budget and Hertz. It has long been a supplier for those large traditional rental fleets and dumped low cost models into those markets without consideration how this undercuts the manufacturer's image and their pricing policies at dealerships. The budget fleet models even turned buyers off when their bad renatl experience made them avoid buying the same model in the showroom. Car2Go, the largest car share globally, is run by Mercedes Benz and initially only offered electric Smart Cars as the vehicle of choice. This brought limited appeal in the US, where car buyers prefer vehicles on steroids and a Smart can look and feel like a crumb between the teeth by comparison. In a reversal of GM's dumping strategy, Mercedes is trying to appeal to potential car buyers by now offering in select cities luxury sedans as part of Car2Go.
 |
| BMW's electric car share fleet is collaborating with Sixt car rental |
If car sharing would become standard practice, the sharing and the AV technology combined could mean a lot fewer cars are sold. This would have positive effects for cities and the environment, provided the right policies are in place to prevent that transit gets starved out or AVs will be deployed in a frivolous manner. Either way, the impacts on the automotive economy is not clear at all.
Car sharing isn't all that different than tool, moving truck or backhoe rental and one can expect that those traditional rental functions will also become streamlined and app based allowing it to be used by a broader base that isn't just contractors or do-it-yourselfers but also by start-ups and gig entrepreneurs.
 |
| How to share the public domaine: Fleet parking |
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
No comments:
Post a Comment