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On a rainy morning in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a college student walked into a public downtown parking garage and up to a car. He pressed a few buttons on his smartphone. A few moments later, the lights flashed on the Chevy Spark in front of him and its doors unlocked. He got in and drove away.
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“Not bad,” says a man standing to the side, observing this interaction between person, smartphone, and vehicle. “That was 10 to 15 seconds, which is a nice start. What we want is one second—bam—they come up to the car with bags in both hands and they’re in. Less than a second, that would be awesome.”
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Bob Tiderington spends an inordinate amount of time in parking garages like this one to gauge the customer experience. Officially, he’s the senior manager of vehicle sharing operations for Maven, the car-sharing service launched by General Motors earlier this year. Unofficially, he’s a jack-of-all-trades, doing everything from cleaning cars to registering vehicles with state DMVs to evaluating metrics like how long it takes customers to unlock their cars via a Bluetooth-enabled connection.
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He’s been busy. Since starting here in Ann Arbor in January, Maven has expanded to nine U.S. markets, including New York, Washington D.C., San Francisco, and Chicago. Maven recently added Los Angeles to its ranks. The city is “a natural fit for Maven because of the city’s incredible appetite for cars,” said Julia Steyn, vice president of GM’s Urban Mobility and Maven. More cities are on the way.
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“An airport, to me, is a no-brainer. A lot of people have that need. There’s a lot of value as a trip service.”
-– Bob Tiderington
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Overall, Maven now counts more than 11,000 members who, through late October, have logged more than 20.7 million miles, according to General Motors. On an average loan, a Maven member uses a car for 12.41 hours and drives it 100 miles.
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The company’s $500 million investment in ride-hailing venture Lyft, announced at roughly the same time, has garnered far more notice. But the car-sharing venture, created to capitalize on the same trends as Lyft—a projected shift in economics and convenience that may make it more advantageous and cost-effective for motorists to use shared services instead of owning cars—has become an important component of GM’s plans.
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When GM started laying the groundwork for Maven three years ago, Tiderington concedes he sometimes got strange looks from colleagues within the company who viewed the upstart venture as an adversary that threatened traditional ownership models. But General Motors seems pleased with the early results. On its recent 10-Q quarterly report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company counts Maven as an underpinning for its plan to achieve 9 percent to 10 percent overall profit margins by “early next decade.”
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Maven is quickly evolving. In terms of cars offered, the new, all-electric Chevy Bolt will join the car-sharing service. Ann Arbor is slated to be one of the first Maven locations where they’ll enter the fleet. There’s no precise timetable for the Bolt’s arrival, with Tiderington saying that it would be “soon.”
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Other developments are centered as much on the customers as they are on the cars. By virtue of their smartphone connections, it soon will be possible for users to store information on ideal seat position and music preferences, and have them ready in each vehicle.
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“One of them told us they even had nicknamed it Charlie. They said, ‘It’s not a blue Volt, it’s Charlie.’”
-– Bob Tiderington
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A loyalty program is also in the works. Frequent users or users who get high ratings for keeping cars in clean condition will receive perks. “You might say, ‘Here are the keys to an Escalade for the weekend with a gift inside,” Tiderington said. “Something like that. It’s sooner than you think—around the corner.”
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Maven’s membership is a mere fraction of the current car-share market, which, led by Zipcar, consists of about 1.2 million people in North America, according to a recent study from the Center for Automotive Research. That analysis, published in August, suggests significant growth ahead, projecting that the market will expand to nearly 3.8 million users by 2021.
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The biggest growth will likely be in one-way rentals. CAR says such rentals can attract three to four times the membership base as round-trip shared cars, and the fledgling Maven brand is positioning itself to capitalize on that trend. In September, it again used Ann Arbor as its test bed, launching a one-way service that permits users to rent a Spark, drive it 30 miles to Detroit Metropolitan Airport, and leave it at an off-airport lot for $3.50. That’s a significant discount from regular prices. Typically, the cars in the Maven fleet cost $8 per hour to rent, while the Cadillac Escalade and Chevy Tahoe SUVs run $14 per hour.
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Airports figure heavily in Maven’s future plans for one-way rides and as locations to keep vehicles. “An airport, to me, is a no-brainer,” Tiderington said. “A lot of people have that need. There’s a lot of value as a trip service. If you’re here, say you’re an alumni coming back for a game and you just need to get back and forth. Or I’ll go to a city and I’ll take a cab, but this is less expensive.”
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From the airport, Maven figures to be as much a competitive threat to car-rental services such as Hertz or Avis as it would be to traditional taxis. But inside cities, or in and around college campuses, the competition isn’t nearly as direct. Maven, according to Tiderington, performs better in markets where there are lots of transportation options rather than only one.
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Like this parking garage in Ann Arbor, across the street from the city’s bus station, cars are often chosen based on their close proximity to other transportation infrastructure, as well as central places on college campuses. Here in Ann Arbor, Maven has become particularly popular with the University of Michigan’s international students, whom Tiderington says have gravitated toward the Chevy Volt for its environmentally friendly footprint.
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“One of them told us they even had nicknamed it Charlie,” he said. “They said, ‘It’s not a blue Volt, it’s Charlie.’”
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It’s only a single anecdote, but it’s nonetheless one that flies in the face of the idea that younger generations will turn the vehicles of next-generation transportation into depersonalized, utilitarian pods. It’s possible, as the enthusiasm for Charlie shows, that occupants will still make emotional connections with cars, even ones that are shared.
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