Skip to main content

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

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.

Related 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.

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

Beware of this EV with pitiful charging speed — and others like it
apple maps to get new ev feature eliminate range anxiety close up of the hybrid car electric charger station with power suppl

With a proper setup, owning and driving an electric car can be a pretty seamless experience. If you have a charger at home, you'll never really have to worry about charging -- simply plug in at home, and your car will always have enough juice to get you through the day.

But that convenience can fall apart when you go on road trips. Whether it's just a short jaunt out of town, or a cross-country adventure, you'll suddenly have to keep track of nearby charging stations, and allot enough time to charge up your car. With a car like the Kia EV6 and Ioniq 5, that can be a relatively quick stop -- especially if you find a 350-kilowatt charging station that can charge your car in a matter of 15 or 20 minutes.

Read more
Watch Hyundai’s Ioniq 5 EV perform a crab walk
Hyundai's Ioniq 5 EV performing a crab walk.

Hyundai is making exciting progress with its e-Corner technology that lets a driver “crab walk” out of a tight spot. Other maneuvers such as zero turns, pivot turns, and diagonal driving are also possible.

Hyundai has been working on the technology for at least five years, and previously showed it off in purpose-built vehicles that aren’t on the market.

Read more
Mercedes EV charging hubs are coming to North America by the end of the decade
What a future Mercedes-Benz EV charging hub might look like.

You can't have more electric cars without more charging stations, so Mercedes-Benz is building a global charging network covering North America, China, Europe, and other major markets to support its goal of going all-electric by the end of the decade where market conditions allow.

Announced at CES 2023, the network should be in place by the end of the decade in line with Mercedes' electrification goal. It's a bold move by the automaker, which has mostly relied on third-party charging networks until now.

Read more