GM shuts down car-sharing service Maven

It's closer to the other way around. Everyone without a car wishes they had one, everyone with a car takes it for granted.

And car sharing like that isn't a bad idea. All this talk of slack in the supply chain--personally owned cars are a huge amount of slack. Sure, they're an insurance policy, but a very expensive one.

I don't a once a century event give rationale people won't share cars. Generally people are very forgetful. E.g We have economic crashes every decade or so but perhaps even the majority of people still overspend on credit rather than sacrifice for rainy day funds.

Ultimately it will come down to price, convenience and personal budget. My opinion anyway.

Owning a car is a lot of hassle. It's super expensive, it takes time to maintain it, you have to park it, you may have issues with it.

Renting a shared car from a phone still sound appealing to me.

Just wait till self sanitizing + self driving cars come out.

Here is a live dashboard of car sharing growth based on Turo/Getaround data: https://www.sharelytics.co/blog/the-state-of-carsharing-car-...

The ability to spin the disaster as something positive is exactly why this person is a VP at GM. This kind of skill is necessary but not sufficient to be an executive.

they own cruise, which will open its own car-sharing platform in the future. Seems directly related to me.

OT, but does anyone know where the "learnings" phrase in corporatese come from? I noticed it five or six years ago and now it's everywhere. The first time I heard it was from a German VP and I assumed it was some sort of odd transliteration or maybe a Borat reference, but that hypothesis is obviously invalidated.

In San Francisco, I attempted to use their service once, and I recall there being a tiny number of cars in the city, and none of them were anywhere near my home.

Apparently they couldn’t raise prices without losing out to Lyft and Uber, and the cars were expensive to service and maintain.

My observation in NYC metro: the idea of car sharing is flawed because turns out most demands are for weekend trips, and on weekdays the cars sit idle, which sorta defeats the purpose of sharing. As a result, if you use cars frequently on the weekends, it's much more convenient and only a bit more expensive to have your own car.

It’s still amazing how uneconomical it is to me not owning a car outside of any highly dense metropolitan are (where you can walk to get most daily supplies and parking is expensive).

I mean, even a quick drive to the store to get milk is a $20 fee without a car. Doing even just a single unplanned trip a week and the economics are way out of wack.

I would actually think the opposite.

For the last few years, we've been fine with occasional rentals, but I do wish we had one now. Would have been easier to buy food in bulk when this started, and we could drive out of our dense neighborhood and walk around somewhere where social distancing is easier.

Zipcar laid off one fifth of their workers.

https://www.americaninno.com/boston/inno-news-boston/zipcar-...

As people are starting to realize mass transit is one of the most dangerous places to be with regard to COVID-19, they are going to flock to driving if they can.

As a customer of a Zipcar-like service, I notice that our own use has cratered:

* No more use for e.g. extended trips, because there's nowhere to go.

* Lots of exposed surfaces inside the car, and confined space compared to public transit, so there's an infection concern.

Excess supply gave the world AWS (abt 15 years ago)

Seems tautological, especially for a platform biz. Companies that don't "aggregate demand" fail because "aggregating demand" is just a fancy way of saying "have a critical mass of customers". It's tautological because companies that "succeed" by aggregating supply eventually also aggregate demand because... well, because companies without customers don't "succeed". So, if you "succeed", you've aggregated demand, regardless of whether you were able to aggregate demand by aggregating supply. Teasing out the causality is hard, but it'll always be possible to post-facto confirm the hypothesis that successful (platform) companies aggregate demand.

The substantive conjecture behind his tautology is about the economics and business model of SDC-as-ridesharing. Seems like a moot point to me. A working SDC will be enormously profitable regardless of whether the company that builds it gets to own the platform. Plus, the big auto cos might be able to afford to not win the SDC race, but they certainly can't afford to not even play the game. A lot of the money spent on SDCs is seen as hedging, not as serious plays.

The opposite is the modern reformation of Say’s law. Supply creates demand, there’s a market clearing price for any quantity. (Cf. Sowell). Sort of a fig leaf of theory to promote supply-side economics.

The two must be interlinked but one person has an idea of a product that doesn’t yet exist, and the creation of the product creates demand. The other has the idea that demand causes suppliers to produce.

Build it and they will come. Another aphorism. Not generally true.

Car sharing is a great idea. The economics are difficult to convey to customers. Keeping enough vehicles in enough places to make it a reasonable facility is difficult, but required to make people see the value. It’s also very hard to convince people to go carless in their current life.

I think its more related to "commoditizing" than just aggregating.

E.g. if you can commoditize the demand size to a single standard unit (and then have demand to back it up) that's miles stronger than commoditizing the supply side.

In this example it seems to refer to GM having the supply ready, but absolutely failing to find the commodity standard and demand base to grow forward.