GM expected to boost peer-to-peer car sharing

Company’s push into new technologies already faces competition

General Motors signalled a major pivot toward new technologies and mobility platforms when it announced the closing of its Oshawa assembly plant, but it will be playing catch-up to startups that have pioneered in the field.

One of the spaces it’s pushing into is peer-to-peer car sharing, which GM added to its Maven app in July in the U.S., as it tests out new models of transportation in an evolving market.

“What we truly believe is as society progresses, shareable assets will be the most desirable to own,” Julia Steyn, vice-president of urban mobility and Maven at GM, said at a recent technology conference.

“People don’t want, anymore, to have the dream that their parents had, which is they don’t want half of their paycheque to go to housing and transportation. And so that’s just fundamentally what’s happening in the world.”

Still in a pilot phase, the peerto-peer platform allows GM customers to rent out their vehicles, offsetting some of the costs of ownership.

“The wasted assets that the car represents when it sits there 95 per cent of the time, idle, is ridiculous. So you want to be able to monetize it,” Steyn said.

Canadians don’t yet have the option of using Maven’s peerto-peer sharing option, and its more conventional service of renting company vehicles is only available in Toronto, but Steyn said the company plans to “aggressively grow in Canada.”

When it does expand the service to Canada, it will find competition in Turo, which has been operating a peer-to-peer car sharing service in Canada for more than two years and in the U.S. for a decade.

Turo, however, welcomes the news of Maven’s expansion plans.

“It just shows that this type of car sharing model is becoming more mainstream,” said Cedric Mathieu, director of Turo Canada.

“And I do think the more players in the space, the more people will hear about it and the benefits of this model.”

The model allows drivers to list any vehicle on the app, with a few restrictions on its age, mileage, and condition, and then rent it out along a similar idea to Airbnb.

“The concept is simple, but the mission is pretty ambitious because it’s really about putting the world’s billion-plus cars to better use,” Mathieu said.

The company believes the platform solves many of the issues such as parking, variety and supply that have prevented other car-sharing efforts from delivering on the promise of the concept.

The efficiency of the model and the technology behind it has allowed for rapid growth, Mathieu said.

“You can grow this extremely fast. That, I think, really is shown by our numbers in Canada. In just two and a half years, we now have 16,000 cars listed, 4,000 cars available to book on a daily basis.”

As the first-mover in Canada, Turo has also pushed to solve the insurance issue of renting out a personal vehicle for money. The company has partnered with Intact Insurance to provide a separate insurance product that only kicks in for rentals. Intact has partnered with Uber on a similar model.