Over the past few years people were saying that self-driving cars would be the end of car ownership as we know it, that the masses would adopt car sharing, and if you needed a car you would just summon one on your phone.
The coronavirus has revealed how bad that idea was. Everyone who has a privately owned car is glad they have it, and they won't forget that once this is all over.
I don't a once a century event give rationale people won't share cars. Generally people are very forgetful. E.g We have economic crashes every decade or so but perhaps even the majority of people still overspend on credit rather than sacrifice for rainy day funds.
Ultimately it will come down to price, convenience and personal budget. My opinion anyway.
I don't know this makes me never ever want to lose the optionality of my own car with my own private space. Uber prices spiked where I can't even make a cost case for not having a car.
It's closer to the other way around. Everyone without a car wishes they had one, everyone with a car takes it for granted.
And car sharing like that isn't a bad idea. All this talk of slack in the supply chain--personally owned cars are a huge amount of slack. Sure, they're an insurance policy, but a very expensive one.
A regular car like a Toyota Corolla or something isn't very expensive for the average adult. Unless they live in a dense area and have to pay for parking.
Almost everyone in the US in areas that aren't densely populated has a car. 90% of households in Dallas have a car. The ~only people thinking about a car will be ones in places where they have to pay for parking.
"A regular car like a Toyota Corolla or something isn't very expensive for the average adult. Unless they live in a dense area and have to pay for parking."
"Owning a car is a lot of hassle. It's super expensive, it takes time to maintain it, you have to park it, you may have issues with it.
Renting a shared car from a phone still sound appealing to me."
I found it very telling that these two comments were literally one after the other on my screen...
For those not aware, car sharing in general has been on the decline recently. This is after GM scaled back Maven significantly last year following bad financials in cities where it was active [1]. It turns out that different mobility options like car sharing and scooters have wildly different demand curves and expected profitability figures depending on where they're deployed due to a combination of things like culture, infrastructure, alternatives, weather, and price sensitivity.
Turo is a very different model, to the point it's not a great comparison. It's more of user platform (like Uber) than an actual car service and doing reasonably well as a result. But pretty much every fleet-based service is shuttering cities - ReachNow, car2go, LimePod, Maven, etc.
“We’ve gained extremely valuable insights from operating our own car-sharing business,” Pamela Fletcher, GM’s vice president of global innovation, said in a statement. “Our learnings and developments from Maven will go on to benefit and accelerate the growth of other areas of GM business.”
What a load of bullshit, just say the business failed and you shut it down. This is another example of the post-truth world where anyone can say whatever they want even if it's stupid and wrong. Startups that fail didn't have a wonderful journey, products that fail don't give valuable insight into entirely different lines of business (well, they might give some insight), and an executive that leaves after 2 months isn't a good sign no matter how they twist it.
The ability to spin the disaster as something positive is exactly why this person is a VP at GM. This kind of skill is necessary but not sufficient to be an executive.
Let’s please not generalize here. One does not need to deceive in order to be an executive. And we must make a moral example out of organizations and societies where this is considered necessary for profit.
OT, but does anyone know where the "learnings" phrase in corporatese come from? I noticed it five or six years ago and now it's everywhere. The first time I heard it was from a German VP and I assumed it was some sort of odd transliteration or maybe a Borat reference, but that hypothesis is obviously invalidated.
Generalized door-to-door self-driving is decades away. And when it's here, the average person isn't going to be renting out their car. If the economics work, cars will come from centralized rental services like... ZipCar. Maybe car manufacturers will decide they want to rent cars directly but they could today and don't.
I didn't get a chance to use Maven but I loved using ReachNow, Car2Go and LimePod in Seattle before they each shut down.
I would think the biggest strength of free floating car sharing would be the utilization rate of of the vehicles compared to private ownership.
Looking at the vehicle availability maps, it was clear that there were a lot of trips taking place. Of course some cars ended up in low-demand areas, but on average it seemed there was a lot of rental activity.
I am really curious to know what didn't work, from a business model perspective. None of the shutdown announcements have provided any specific details.
In San Francisco, I attempted to use their service once, and I recall there being a tiny number of cars in the city, and none of them were anywhere near my home.
I used Maven a few times. My biggest complaint was the stupid requirement to unlock the car with Bluetooth. The last time I rented a car, my phone never stayed in sync. I had to reboot my phone everytime I wanted to lock/unlock the car. And you'd better hope your phone doesn't die.
My observation in NYC metro: the idea of car sharing is flawed because turns out most demands are for weekend trips, and on weekdays the cars sit idle, which sorta defeats the purpose of sharing. As a result, if you use cars frequently on the weekends, it's much more convenient and only a bit more expensive to have your own car.
How is Zipcar doing? Maven seemed to have better cars at a better price. What's the difference in their business models?
Interesting that with everyone sheltering in place, now would be the time where some people realize that they may not need to own a car. Zipcar, and maybe Maven could have, been great for occasional use scenearios.
It’s still amazing how uneconomical it is to me not owning a car outside of any highly dense metropolitan are (where you can walk to get most daily supplies and parking is expensive).
I mean, even a quick drive to the store to get milk is a $20 fee without a car. Doing even just a single unplanned trip a week and the economics are way out of wack.
Yeah, I think the closest you can really get is 1 car per family depending on the work/school situation but even that's kinda hard to swing. It works for me and my partner because despite being in the burbs I can walk to work so it works out being 1-2 rides a month which makes way more sense financially.
Non-urban areas are almost by definition automobile-centered in a country like the US. They don't have the density required to support a lifestyle that doesn't depend on automobiles.
For the last few years, we've been fine with occasional rentals, but I do wish we had one now. Would have been easier to buy food in bulk when this started, and we could drive out of our dense neighborhood and walk around somewhere where social distancing is easier.
As people are starting to realize mass transit is one of the most dangerous places to be with regard to COVID-19, they are going to flock to driving if they can.
> mass transit is one of the most dangerous places to be with regard to COVID-19
Maybe when things start to reopen, but in the Bay Area, transit agencies have been reporting incredibly low numbers. I heard stories of two people in a train car.
I don't believe this. Social distancing won't last forever. You could say that nothing that requires people to stay 2m apart will last, and that clearly won't remain true forever.
Yeah, I was actually thinking when the coronavirus started that ridesharing and carsharing would be unaffected as much. Public transportation seems to have 1000x the amount of people touching the same surfaces (e.g. turnstiles, doors, handlebars, etc...)
The opposite is the modern reformation of Say’s law. Supply creates demand, there’s a market clearing price for any quantity. (Cf. Sowell). Sort of a fig leaf of theory to promote supply-side economics.
The two must be interlinked but one person has an idea of a product that doesn’t yet exist, and the creation of the product creates demand. The other has the idea that demand causes suppliers to produce.
Build it and they will come. Another aphorism. Not generally true.
Car sharing is a great idea. The economics are difficult to convey to customers. Keeping enough vehicles in enough places to make it a reasonable facility is difficult, but required to make people see the value. It’s also very hard to convince people to go carless in their current life.
Seems tautological, especially for a platform biz. Companies that don't "aggregate demand" fail because "aggregating demand" is just a fancy way of saying "have a critical mass of customers". It's tautological because companies that "succeed" by aggregating supply eventually also aggregate demand because... well, because companies without customers don't "succeed". So, if you "succeed", you've aggregated demand, regardless of whether you were able to aggregate demand by aggregating supply. Teasing out the causality is hard, but it'll always be possible to post-facto confirm the hypothesis that successful (platform) companies aggregate demand.
The substantive conjecture behind his tautology is about the economics and business model of SDC-as-ridesharing. Seems like a moot point to me. A working SDC will be enormously profitable regardless of whether the company that builds it gets to own the platform. Plus, the big auto cos might be able to afford to not win the SDC race, but they certainly can't afford to not even play the game. A lot of the money spent on SDCs is seen as hedging, not as serious plays.
the difference is that in contrast to digital roads, analogue roads are notoriously limited in growth.
The transport sector does not scale in the way a digital product does, for a multitude of very obvious reasons. Simply put, it's mostly not really a technological product.
I think its more related to "commoditizing" than just aggregating.
E.g. if you can commoditize the demand size to a single standard unit (and then have demand to back it up) that's miles stronger than commoditizing the supply side.
In this example it seems to refer to GM having the supply ready, but absolutely failing to find the commodity standard and demand base to grow forward.
Still kind of confused with the jargon (what then does commoditizing demand versus supply mean?)
But to be honest, what I think this all boils down to is that GM created a service that was not high in demand. IMO car sharing just isn't that high in demand as ride sharing.
The coronavirus has revealed how bad that idea was. Everyone who has a privately owned car is glad they have it, and they won't forget that once this is all over.