GM Unveils Maven, Its New Play in Car-Sharing Services | Hacker News Reader

GM Unveils Maven, Its New Play in Car-Sharing Services

techcrunch.com

48 pointsprostoalex36 comments

I really like this play - GM can undercut other organizations that are forced to purchase their vehicles, as well as realizing savings on maintenance. Over time, they can slowly strangle competitors in the car manufacturing business - users lower their usage of personal vehicles, due to easy access to Maven vehicles. Then they switch away to Maven permanently.

It also sets them up, in the long term, to run a self-driving car organization. It establishes the brand, service, and the maintenance organization.

I thought this was weird at first too, but the more I think on it and the more I realize how much of GM's output just ends up in fleets anyway, the more I realize how much it makes a kind of sense.

Except that I doubt they'd want their entire output to end up in fleets. The margins are far lower.

The whole trend away from personal ownership of cars is very bad for manufacturers because it changes the buying decision from an emotional one to a carefully calculated business one. People are generally willing to pay far higher margins when emotions are involved.

I suspect they feel they have no choice but to get involved in this trend, and are very unhappy that they're doing this.

They also can influence and downright force infrastructure updates to better serve the self driving vehicles.

And, one hopes a benefit to those who might prefer ownership, they might build even more durable easier to maintain vehicles. The anti apple approach to manufacturing improvement. [apple and co depending on voluntary obsolescence and difficult repairs]

Huh, that’s weird. My first thought was, “better quality manufacturing that feels like they last for goddamn ever, like my Macbooks and iPhones.” YMMV I guess

Mac build quality is fine. It's their accessibility and repairability with standard industry components.

Nice to see more competition in this area. However, I find it concerning to see vertical integration between a car manufacturer and a car-sharing service. I can certainly understand why they might do so (as a hedge against societal changes towards needing fewer cars), but I also wonder whether that vertical integration will result in some unfortunate incentives.

Deleted comment

First, this doesn't look like a ride-sharing service (and neither does Uber or Lyft, quite frankly); this article depicts Maven as a car-sharing service, similar to Zipcar.

And second, I never said anything about legal issues. I don't see a legal issue or requirement against vertical integration. I simply wondered whether this might create a set of incentives that don't align with what consumers want. That wasn't meant as a suggestion to prevent that through regulation.

To actually say something about legal issues directly: while I don't particularly want to see regulation in either area, I see far fewer ethical issues with regulations attempting to protect people and encourage the construction of better services that people want, and far more ethical issues with laws protecting existing services from competition by people trying to build better services. The former regulations at least try to benefit people; the latter benefit the specific protected companies. And I consider it perfectly reasonable to evaluate ethics as orthogonal to current law.

The users of Maven pick up passengers like Uber drivers. It's like a milkshake machine manufacturer that leases their product to restaurants so they can get started without much capital.

As long as GM invests in maintenance of the cars themselves and the software inside, this reads like a sound, time-tested business strategy to me.

“Maven customers will experience seamless smartphone and keyless integration with the vehicle. Maven customers use its app to search for and reserve a vehicle by location or car type and unlock the vehicle with their smartphone. The app also enables remote functions such as starting, heating or cooling and more. Customers can bring their digital lives into the vehicle through Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, OnStar, SiriusXM radio and 4GLTE wireless. Each vehicle will provide an ownership-like experience with the convenience of car-sharing.”

Maven 'passengers' are the drivers. They rent a car, pay by the hour.

Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, OnStar, SiriusXM radio and 4GLTE

I don't have any of those things, in any of my cars, and thus they are irrelevant to the ownership experience. The ownership experience for me is not finding someone else's used condoms under the seat.

I'm fairly certain after reviewing the Maven site that you are incorrect in that understanding. As stated this very much seems to be like a ZipCar service only with far fewer locations, which makes it really far less than attractive or meeting a certain threshold of viability. If they had somehow tried something similar to a Car2Go service in a limited area and flooded the area in cars so that the service actually improved one's life without hassle, then I could have seen this taking off.

> The users of Maven pick up passengers like Uber drivers.

Interesting; I don't see anything to suggest that in the linked article. That article seems to talk much more about car-sharing, rather than a transportation service.

  mvn clean package
  mvn deploy

Seems to me like a smart way to get their feet wet in the industry before autonomous cars become available. Since the first few generations will likely cost in multi-100,000 dollar range, the car-sharing model makes a ton of sense.

GM employee here. I have to say I'm impressed with where my company is headed.

"As low as $6/hour"

Which means you can expect ~50% more than that for the realistic case -- maybe $9-10/hour. Which (at $200+/day) is no better than an average rental car.

If you need to rent for a day, sure. But services like these target shorter-term rentals.

i.e. pretty much the same as Zipcar short-term rentals (which seems to be $7.50-$8.50/hr). Zipcar at least also has a daily option that's about $70, so in the same ballpark as rentals. (Though people I know who use Zipcar often use car rental services like rent-a-wreck for daily rentals.) They typically use the short term rentals to run errands or otherwise go places for a few hours.

The only ZipCars you'll find for ~$8/hour are hybrids. I live in Boston, and unless I book the car well in advance (or am willing to go well out of my way to get it), they're long gone. $10-13/hour is much more typical with what's available on a "right now and near me" basis.

Yeah, but I'd love to be able to rent a car for just three hours.

Heck, it'd be nice to be able to park my truck outside of the city limits and borrow a subcompact until I get downtown. I don't need to tow downtown and I don't need four wheel drive downtown, so why try to find a place where I can parallel park a full sized pickup truck when I could ditch it outside of town and borrow a Sonic for 20 minutes?

Meanwhile I'd like to borrow your truck because I live out in the burbs and need to carry 1000 pounds of crushed gravel home. The competitors are truck delivery for $50 or whatever it is, and the $19.95 for 3 hours home depot truck rental, so the pricing is kinda constrained...

I suspect this will be a problem with truck rentals. I'm a clean gentleman and I'll sweep out your truck after removing my 20 bags of gravel... but you just know there's gonna be people hauling hundreds of pounds of raw chicken manure for composting or whatever...

Yeah, I am much more picky when it comes to letting people borrow my truck than I am my car, and the car is newer and worth substantially more money. When people want to borrow my car, they just want to get from A to B. Worst thing that can happen is they spill their Starbucks or they're a little too hard on the throttle and they burn up my full tank of gas.

When they want to borrow my truck, they want to haul things with it. When you're hauling with someone else's truck, weigh limits don't matter because transmissions don't usually fail spectacularly the first time you haul 3000 lbs over the towing limit. Frames don't get bent and shocks don't get blown the first time you load the bed down with 500 lbs too many cinder blocks. What's the tongue weight limit on your friend's truck? What's the bed weight limit? Doesn't matter, right? Plus the liability if they don't hook up the trailer right, aren't using the lights or sway bar, etc. And god forbid they drive it in four wheel drive on dry pavement and wreck my center differential.

The very nature of "I need to borrow a truck" is the very reason why I don't lend mine out, and likely the reason why renting a truck is so expensive. Driving a rental car hard is nothing compared to driving a rental truck hard.

BMW has one. M. Benz, too.

At this rate, every auto manufacturer will have its own car-sharing service. Traditional taxi and car rental companies are about to go the way of the dodo.

Car rental companies used to be at least partially owned by manufacturers: for instance Avis was partially owned by GM [1] (at least 29% at one point). These were used to offload excess inventory and prop up production of lower-feature cars.

It will be interesting to see how these services are used strategically by manufacturers - possibly refreshing these fleets when consumer demand is low; and subsequently how this is signalled to service users. It does look like for now these are full featured cars.

Enterprise currently has a car-sharing service as well. [2]

Disclaimer: I work for GM, but not in this area; these opinions are solely my own.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avis_Rent_a_Car_System

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_Rent-A-Car#Enterpri...

I like the direction where GM is going - Car as a Service model with seamless HAI (Human Access Interface). I just concocted this.

Isn't a major limitation of "Car as a Service" the fact that millions of people commute at approximately the same time? Services like this seem like they would be fantastic if you live somewhere with good public transport/bike/pedestrian accessibility to get around during peak times and just need a car occasionally but do not seem viable in a suburban environment (where tens of millions of us still live). Hopefully innovation like this will result in better public and alternative forms of transportation that allow the car as a service to work in suburban environments.

True, I was thinking about Urban areas. As you pointed out this should gradually grow to cover suburban sprawls.

I am imagining CaaS parking spaces popping up everywhere.

ZipCar was the first innovator in this space.

How is GM going to differentiate this service from Zipcar?

Can you park the cars in different places than where you got them? More granular billing?

At the start the only spots are on campus, but I'm hoping they will eventually offer true one way trips ala car2go, which I've found to be a fundamentally more useful service than zipcar. $6/hour if you only need one hour to say go from school to a store to home is awesome. If you need to return it to the original parking spot and then make your way home from there you're doubling the time and eliminating the convenience.

> Rates for getting cars through these programs will cost as low as $6/hour, Ammann said.

What a giant rip-off. I can rent a car for $16.24 per day, right now. Maven is 8 times more expensive.

And you're presumably stuck driving a GM too.

So like ZipCar?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com