GM expands car-sharing service
TORONTO • General Motors Co. is expanding its car- sharing service outside the United States for the first time, with the official launch of Maven in Toronto, part of the automaker’s ambitious plans to decrease congestion and emissions.
Starting Tuesday, Torontonians will be able to use GM’s Maven app to book one of 40 GM vehicles parked in locations across the city. The expansion comes more than a year after the automaker launched a pilot project in Kitchener- Waterloo, offering the car- sharing service for members of the Communitech Hub, a facility for tech companies and startups in the region.
Julia Steyn, vice-president of GM’s Urban Mobility and Maven operations, said Toronto was the ideal city for Maven’s expansion, given that it is facing many of the same transit challenges that other major cities in North America are experiencing.
“I wish I could say that the challenges Toronto faces are unique, but they are not,” Steyn said.
“There’s huge congestion, it’s very hard to own a vehicle, it’s expensive to park, you basically pay for the privilege of your car sitting there a majority of time (not being used). There’s definitely demand for a service like this.”
Maven will offer 40 GM vehicles to start, including smaller cars such as the Chevrolet Cruze and plug-in hybrid Volt, as well as larger SUVs like the GMC Acadia and Yukon and Cadillac XT5. Users will be able to park the car in dedicated Maven spots in neighbourhoods around the city.
GM has made several announcements in recent months as part of its push toward ride- sharing, self- driving cars and electric vehicles. In December, the company unveiled its plan to bring a self- driving, ride- sharing fleet to large American cities by 2019. GM has also announced plans to launch 20 all-electric vehicles by 2023.
“We look at Maven as part of GM’s bigger strategy of working toward zero congestion, zero emissions and zero collisions,” GM Canada’s president Steve Carlisle said. “Toronto has a lot of those challenges, despite having very good infrastructure and public transit. We see Maven and other things we’re doing with mobility and technology as a great place to be and contribute to solving these problems.”
GM says that for every vehicle being shared, 10 more are taken off the road — which may seem like a threat to the automaker’s existing business, but Steyn says it is “hugely complementary.”
“Ownership of vehicles in large urban areas has been declining. Customers are evolving, and choosing other ways to get around,” Steyn said.
“So you can close your eyes and keep losing market share in big metropolitan areas, or you can offer something that is complimentary and brings customers into GM vehicles.”
Maven is also a way to attract younger customers to the GM brand. Steyn said millennials make up 78 per cent of the app’s users, with the average customer age coming in at 30.
While the automaker is open to expanding the service to cities such as Montreal and Vancouver, Carlisle said the focus on the moment is to concentrate on how the service will evolve in Toronto.
“We’re interested to see how this develops in Toronto and how the demand builds up — what products are interesting to people, and what the usage patterns are,” he said.
“We can follow the growth and then based on what we learn in Toronto, see where it could make sense elsewhere in the country. ... But for the time being, Toronto is exciting to us and that’s where the focus is going to be.”