General Motors Vice President Urban Mobility and Maven Julia Steyn said the company will be adding non-GM vehicles to its peer-to-peer rental fleet.
Maven, General Motors’ private ride-sharing service, is undergoing an expansion early next year. Before gig-based entrepreneurs around the country begin salivating, the expansion is product-based not geographic.
The company is going to allow non-GM brand products to be rented on the platform starting in the middle of 2019, a GM official revealed.
According to Julia Steyn, vice president of GM Urban Mobility and Maven, said Monday during a presentation at the UBS Global Technology Conference in San Francisco, that Maven plans expand the platform to micro-fleet entrepreneurs.
Additionally, Steyn said company will add more services and expand its geographic footprint both within the U.S. and internationally.
(GM is going to build eBikes and it wants the public to name them. Click Here for the story.)
Maven has been a bit of a chameleon since its creation in January 2016. Initially envisioned as a car-sharing service, it’s morphed to offer different types of services, most recently following the lead of Turo and Getaround allowing owners to rent their vehicles to others.
At the time of the launch, the program only allowed owners to rent out their personal Chevrolet, Buick, GMC or Cadillac cars or trucks. To qualify, the vehicles have to be a GM model year 2015 and newer.
GM thought Maven may be its key to the gig-economy, particularly ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft. Maven Gig rented vehicles to drivers of those services and others as well as offering sweet lease deals for ride-share drivers.
(Click Here to see more about how the rental car business is being squeezed by ride-sharing.)
Unlike competitors, Maven is maintaining this dual car-sharing approach, Autoblog reported. It will continue to offer its own fleet of GM-branded cars for rent on the platform and expand the peer-to-peer option to more cities.
Maven, which has 170,000 members, is using the peer-to-peer car-sharing option to diversify its supply and to expand its market reach.
“Cars is where our heritage is, but I’ll tell you where else it’s going to go, Steyn said, before noting that there are a lot of assets out their such as boats that are under-utilized and could be monetized on a platform like Maven.
(To see more about Maven’s peer-to-peer car-sharing service, Click Here.)
“If, at some point, there’s a UFO that you want shared and you want to be on the platform and it’s going to do a job for somebody, we’ll be able to put it on the platform,” Steyn said.