Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Cars
  3. News

GM hits reverse with Maven carsharing as it closes service in eight cities

By

General Motors (GM) is set to shutter its Maven carsharing service in almost half of the cities in which it operates.

“We’re shifting Maven’s offerings to concentrate on markets in which we have the strongest current demand and growth potential,” the company said in a statement delivered to the Wall Street Journal on Monday, May 20.

Recommended Videos

Maven will end its service in “the next few months” in 8 of the 17 North American cities where it currently operates, including Chicago and Boston.

Related

Although a full breakdown is yet to be revealed, GM was able to confirm that Maven’s app-based carsharing service will continue to be offered in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Detroit, and Toronto.

Maven competes with the likes of Zipcar and Car2Go, offering city folks a variety of GM cars at hourly and daily rates. Digital Trends recently tried it out.

As of June 2018, Maven said it had just over 145,000 people signed up to its service, with more than 290 million miles driven.

Automakers are increasingly keen to explore a multitude of new mobility platforms in the hunt for additional revenue streams. But the highly competitive environment is evidently proving too much for some players.

As part of its own expansion efforts, GM and Maven launched a peer-to-peer service in October 2018 that let car owners rent out their vehicles to others in a transaction that gave the company a 40-percent cut of the fees, with the rest going to the owner. It also offers short-term vehicle rentals to Uber and Lyft drivers for their ridesharing work via a service called Maven Gig. It’s not yet clear to what extent — if at all — these services will be affected by the ending of Maven’s carsharing service in the listed cities.

While GM is continuing to back Maven, the American car giant is also investing heavily in the development of self-driving cars in partnership with Cruise Automation, and has an eye on launching a robo-taxi service by the end of 2019. Waymo has been operating a limited robo-taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona, since the end of last year.

A recent study named GM Cruise, Waymo, and Ford as the three companies most likely to launch large-scale commercial services using autonomous vehicles. The study examined 10 criteria — including technical capability and business-plan viability — to reach its findings.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
What is Maven carsharing?
Maven car sharing Chevrolet Bolt EV

If you don’t own a car, carsharing services can get you behind the wheel without the expense of monthly payments or maintenance costs -- and without the hassle of having to find parking. From Zipcar to Turo, there are plenty of carsharing choices, but Maven is different. Maven is a carsharing service owned and operated by General Motors. It’s helping GM expand beyond car sales and cash in on the mobility service trend, but does that mean Maven is right for you? Here’s what you need to know.
What is Maven?
GM launched Maven in 2016 to offer mobility services using the automaker’s cars. Other automakers have tried this, with varying degrees of success. Daimler pulled its Car2Go service out of North America in 2019, although Car2Go continues to operate in other countries. Toyota operates a small-scale carsharing service in Hawaii.

Maven’s primary offering is a carsharing service akin to Zipcar, where customers rent cars by the hour or by the day, and pick them up from parking spots scattered throughout urban areas rather than at conventional rental lots. As with Zipcar, the advantages of Maven carsharing are the ability to rent cars for short trips, find cars located in or near your neighborhood, and not have to deal with the complications of standard rental services like Avis or Hertz.

Read more
GM gets serious with $2.2 billion investment in electric trucks, SUVs
General Motors dedicated electric car factory

After years of talk, General Motors is finally getting serious about building large numbers of electric cars. The largest United States automaker will spend $2.2 billion to retool its Detroit-Hamtramck factory for electric-car production. This will be the first GM factory dedicated to electric cars, with cars scheduled to start rolling off its assembly line in 2021.

GM currently has just one all-electric model in its U.S. lineup -- the Chevrolet Bolt EV. That car is built in a factory that also makes gasoline models. GM has said it plans to launch 20 all-electric models globally 2023. While not all of those cars will be sold in the U.S., the plan still requires GM to massively expand manufacturing infrastructure. The investment in the Detroit-Hamtramck plant is the first indication that GM is actually following through with that plan.

Read more
Where we’re going, we don’t need steering wheels, GM’s Cruise believes
Cruise Origin self-driving car

General Motors-owned Cruise is trying is not trying to reinvent the wheel, it's trying to get rid of it. The steering wheel, that is.

The Cruise Origin is an electric car designed from the ground up for autonomous driving. It doesn't have a steering wheel, pedals, or a rearview mirror. What it does have is an array of sensors and a control system derived from Cruise's current fleet of prototype autonomous cars. The lack of manual controls, along with a compact electric powertrain, frees up more space for passengers, Cruise CEO Dan Ammann said in a blog post. Despite its boxy shape, the Origin has roughly the same footprint as an ordinary car, Ammann said.

Read more