通用汽车推出汽车共享服务 Maven（英文版）

Posted 2021-04-30 IHSMarkitAutomotive

Friday, 22 January 2016 by 

On every fronttraditional automakers are under siege. Despite a banner year for car saleshere in the US and globally, executives at nearly every major OEM are unusuallycautious about what the future holds.

Compounding theslumping market factors (China, Millennials skirting car ownership) arepotential disruptors in the automotive industry, and these disruptors appear tobe more attune to what today’s market is asking for. A fairly recentphenomenon, which grew out of the ubiquity of smartphones, is ride-sharing.This six year old industry has already consolidated down into two largeplayers, Uber and Lyft. Both offer a cheap and convenient way for today’scarless Millennials to get around town, an innovative software platform thatallows for easy deployment or tweaking of new services, and a rich source ofanalytical data.

Car-sharing, an olderbusiness model that started in the early 1990s, allows you to locate a nearbyrental car (typically within walking distance) to borrow at an hourly- ordaily-rate. Car-sharing is currently dominated by enterprise level car rentalcompanies like Avis (who owns ZipCar), Hertz and Enterprise. These twoindustries—ride-sharing and car-sharing—as well as traditional rental caragencies form the core operational building blocks for future urbanmobility/autonomous vehicle fleets.

If traditional OEMsaren’t paying attention they may end up becoming subservient to these futurefleet operators as most consumer behavioral and purchasing trends suggest weare primed for the autonomous car age. Automakers aren’t taking this lyingdown, however. They are fighting back on almost all fronts, as the table belowdemonstrates:

 

From a servicesstandpoint, GM has made the most aggressive and speedy foray into bothride-sharing and car-sharing. Part of the value here for GM is its long andsteady history of investing into telematics services—and more recentlyconnected services—through its wholly owned OnStar subsidiary.

GM chief executiveMary Barra revealed last September plans to capitalize on connectivity builtinto the company’s cars, expand car sharing services, offer more autonomousdriving features and enable services through smartphone apps. This was followedby a $500-million investment into ride sharing provider and platform Lyft, andmore recently, the acquisition of Sidecar Technologies, a San Francisco-basedride-handling startup.

For this insight wewill focus on the announcement of General Motor’s personal mobility brandMaven. Maven is an amalgamation of several GM car-sharing services which todayalready serve tens of thousands of users. Maven has been launched with a car-sharing program called City, which isavailable to more than 100,000 faculty and students in Ann Arbor, Michigan,United States. Customers can search for and reserve a vehicle by location orcar type, and the cost is $6 per hour, including insurance and fuel. The appenables remote start, heating, and cooling the vehicle, as well as AppleCarPlay, android Auto, OnStar, Sirius XM Radio, and 4GLTE in-car wireless.

In the first quarter,Maven will integrate GM's Let's Drive NYC program and expand it to Chicagoresidents. The scheme gives residents of specific buildings access to on-demandvehicles and preferred parking. The CarUnity program in Germany will also beincorporated into Maven, providing a peer-to-peer outlet.

Maven isn’t all thatdifferent on the face of it than the two largest OEM driven players incar-sharing, which includes the following:

Daimler’s car2go withnearly 1 million users in 29 cities and 12,000 Smart cars, making it one of thelargest car-sharing operators

BMW’s DriveNow withmore than 300,000 users and approximately 4,000 vehicles

Judging from thesefigures there is a viable business here for GM and there are many markets stillleft untapped.  University campuses havebeen the petri dish for which most car-sharing programs get started, so GM’spartnership with the University of Michigan is a rational starting point forthe service to get its running legs.

Source of recurringrevenue

Beyond PR, brandexposure, and technical expertise, however, what does GM or any automakerreally, expect to gain from car sharing?

In the eyes of OEMs,new urban mobility is a lucrative new business line, potentially as lucrativeas captive lending, aftersales, and telematics and connected services. Moreimportantly it’s a source of recurring revenue. Auto sales fluctuatetremendously due to seasonality which makes managing cash flow, and capacityutilization challenging. Eventually, once car-sharing and ride-sharing mergeinto a single on-demand autonomous car service there’s a large opportunity herefor new urban mobility to satisfy both a recurring revenue benefit for OEMs butalso as a tool to sop up excess plant capacity during times of seasonal downturns.Overall, this would help to strengthen and flatten the revenue curve.

GM is putting thepieces together

Eventuallycar-sharing and ride-sharing will become two sides of the same coin in theautonomous car age. Ride-sharing in its current form doesn’t lend itself aswell as car-sharing to traditional OEM business models. Car-sharing doesn’trequire an OEM to manage hundreds of thousands drivers. Once the drivers areout of the equation, an on-demand autonomous fleet of vehicles would besomething more in an automaker’s wheelhouse.

What GM is doing isputting the pieces together strategically to reap the benefits decades fromnow, when such autonomous fleets are commonplace. GM has a leg up on most OEMs,having global coverage, and decades of IP for its telematics services, and alarge deployment of vehicles with embedded telematics.

ColinBird is Senior Analyst, Automotive Technology, IHS Automotive

EgilJuliussen, PhD is Senior Director & Analyst, Automotive Technology, IHSAutomotive

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