Transportation

GM exits car-sharing business and shuts down Maven

Comment

GM’s experiment with car sharing is over. The automaker Tuesday said its Maven car-sharing service, which launched in 2016, will shut down for good.

Maven had paused service due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The company sent an email to customers Tuesday that after examining the business, the car-sharing industry and COVID-19, it decided to shutter the service permanently. The Verge was the first to report the story.

The car-sharing service has struggled for months, long before COVID-19 upended the “shared” mobility sector. Last year, Maven scaled back and stopped service in nearly half of the 17 North American cities in which it operated. Maven continued to operate in Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Toronto. However, two programs within Maven, its consumer car-sharing and peer-to-peer service, also stopped in Washington, D.C. Only a program directed at gig workers was still operational in that city.

GM confirmed to TechCrunch that it has started to wind down Maven. All assets and resources will be transferred to GM’s Global Innovation organization, as well as the larger enterprise, according to a GM spokesperson.

The company confirmed that all operations should be concluded by later this summer. Maven had already suspended its consumer car-sharing and a peer-to-peer service due to COVID-19. A separate program directed at gig economy workers has been “very limited and will continue to wind down,” a GM spokesperson said.

“We’ve gained extremely valuable insights from operating our own car-sharing business,” Pamela Fletcher, GM’s vice president of global innovation, said in an emailed statement. “Our learnings and developments from Maven will go on to benefit and accelerate the growth of other areas of GM business.”

Below is a screenshot of the email sent Tuesday morning to Maven customers.

maven shut down
Image Credits: Screenshot/Maven email

The company doesn’t have plans to re-enter the car-sharing business. The company told TechCrunch that it “will take the great insights we’ve gained from Maven and leverage its car-sharing technology to provide new GM fleet services, and explore other new service offerings.”

Maven was designed to bring and expand several of GM’s existing test programs under one brand. At the time of its launch, Maven was essentially three car-sharing services in one that included a city-based service that rented GM vehicles by the hour through an app and another for urban apartment dwellers in Chicago and New York.

Maven developed and launched a smartphone app, which was used by customers to search for and reserve a vehicle, unlock the door and remotely start, cool or heat the car. 

It was an important launch for GM and its Chairman and CEO Mary Barra, who used a study commissioned in the wake of the ignition switch engineering scandal to accelerate her plans to transform the culture and operations at the automaker. Dozens of executives participated in transformational leaders programs; Maven was one of the fruits that spun out of that.

A wave of other initiative and investments were announced in 2016 that showed GM’s shift in interest toward unconventional transportation businesses that were adjacent to its core business of producing, selling and financing cars, trucks and SUVs to consumers.

But Maven never quite settled on one business model. The car-sharing service continued to evolve, leaving and entering cities or tweaking where it offered certain programs. For instance, the company launched in 2017 Maven Reserve in Los Angeles and San Francisco to allow customers to rent its GM-branded vehicles for a month at a time. It also started Maven Gig in hopes of tapping into a growing demand from rideshare and delivery app drivers.

Maven then launched a service in summer 2018 in Chicago, Detroit and Ann Arbor that let owners rent out their personal GM-branded vehicles through its Maven car-sharing platform. The peer-to-peer car rental service was designed to operate in a similar fashion to how Turo and Getaround work.

The service’s demise seemed to begin after the company lost its CEO Julia Steyn in January 2019. It scaled back a few months later and was only operating in a handful of cities up until the COVID-19 pandemic put further pressure on the business.

More TechCrunch

Jasper Health, a cancer care platform startup, laid off a substantial part of its workforce, TechCrunch has learned.

General Catalyst-backed Jasper Health lays off staff

Live Nation says its Ticketmaster subsidiary was hacked. A hacker claims to be selling 560 million customer records.

Live Nation confirms Ticketmaster was hacked, says personal information stolen in data breach

Featured Article

Inside EV startup Fisker’s collapse: how the company crumbled under its founders’ whims

An autonomous pod. A solid-state battery-powered sports car. An electric pickup truck. A convertible grand tourer EV with up to 600 miles of range. A “fully connected mobility device” for young urban innovators to be built by Foxconn and priced under $30,000. The next Popemobile. Over the past eight years, famed vehicle designer Henrik Fisker…

14 hours ago
Inside EV startup Fisker’s collapse: how the company crumbled under its founders’ whims

Late Friday afternoon, a time window companies usually reserve for unflattering disclosures, AI startup Hugging Face said that its security team earlier this week detected “unauthorized access” to Spaces, Hugging…

Hugging Face says it detected ‘unauthorized access’ to its AI model hosting platform

Featured Article

Hacked, leaked, exposed: Why you should never use stalkerware apps

Using stalkerware is creepy, unethical, potentially illegal, and puts your data and that of your loved ones in danger.

15 hours ago
Hacked, leaked, exposed: Why you should never use stalkerware apps

The design brief was simple: each grind and dry cycle had to be completed before breakfast. Here’s how Mill made it happen.

Mill’s redesigned food waste bin really is faster and quieter than before

Google is embarrassed about its AI Overviews, too. After a deluge of dunks and memes over the past week, which cracked on the poor quality and outright misinformation that arose…

Google admits its AI Overviews need work, but we’re all helping it beta test

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. In…

Startups Weekly: Musk raises $6B for AI and the fintech dominoes are falling

The product, which ZeroMark calls a “fire control system,” has two components: a small computer that has sensors, like lidar and electro-optical, and a motorized buttstock.

a16z-backed ZeroMark wants to give soldiers guns that don’t miss against drones

The RAW Dating App aims to shake up the dating scheme by shedding the fake, TikTok-ified, heavily filtered photos and replacing them with a more genuine, unvarnished experience. The app…

Pitch Deck Teardown: RAW Dating App’s $3M angel deck

Yes, we’re calling it “ThreadsDeck” now. At least that’s the tag many are using to describe the new user interface for Instagram’s X competitor, Threads, which resembles the column-based format…

‘ThreadsDeck’ arrived just in time for the Trump verdict

Japanese crypto exchange DMM Bitcoin confirmed on Friday that it had been the victim of a hack resulting in the theft of 4,502.9 bitcoin, or about $305 million.  According to…

Hackers steal $305M from DMM Bitcoin crypto exchange

This is not a drill! Today marks the final day to secure your early-bird tickets for TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 at a significantly reduced rate. At midnight tonight, May 31, ticket…

Disrupt 2024 early-bird prices end at midnight

Instagram is testing a way for creators to experiment with reels without committing to having them displayed on their profiles, giving the social network a possible edge over TikTok and…

Instagram tests ‘trial reels’ that don’t display to a creator’s followers

U.S. federal regulators have requested more information from Zoox, Amazon’s self-driving unit, as part of an investigation into rear-end crash risks posed by unexpected braking. The National Highway Traffic Safety…

Feds tell Zoox to send more info about autonomous vehicles suddenly braking

You thought the hottest rap battle of the summer was between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. You were wrong. It’s between Canva and an enterprise CIO. At its Canva Create event…

Canva’s rap battle is part of a long legacy of Silicon Valley cringe

Voice cloning startup ElevenLabs introduced a new tool for users to generate sound effects through prompts today after announcing the project back in February.

ElevenLabs debuts AI-powered tool to generate sound effects

We caught up with Antler founder and CEO Magnus Grimeland about the startup scene in Asia, the current tech startup trends in the region and investment approaches during the rise…

VC firm Antler’s CEO says Asia presents ‘biggest opportunity’ in the world for growth

Temu is to face Europe’s strictest rules after being designated as a “very large online platform” under the Digital Services Act (DSA).

Chinese e-commerce marketplace Temu faces stricter EU rules as a ‘very large online platform’

Meta has been banned from launching features on Facebook and Instagram that would have collected data on voters in Spain using the social networks ahead of next month’s European Elections.…

Spain bans Meta from launching election features on Facebook, Instagram over privacy fears

Stripe, the world’s most valuable fintech startup, said on Friday that it will temporarily move to an invite-only model for new account sign-ups in India, calling the move “a tough…

Stripe curbs its India ambitions over regulatory situation

The 2024 election is likely to be the first in which faked audio and video of candidates is a serious factor. As campaigns warm up, voters should be aware: voice…

Voice cloning of political figures is still easy as pie

When Alex Ewing was a kid growing up in Purcell, Oklahoma, he knew how close he was to home based on which billboards he could see out the car window.…

OneScreen.ai brings startup ads to billboards and NYC’s subway

SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket could take to the skies for the fourth time on June 5, with the primary objective of evaluating the second stage’s reusable heat shield as the…

SpaceX sent Starship to orbit — the next launch will try to bring it back

Eric Lefkofsky knows the public listing rodeo well and is about to enter it for a fourth time. The serial entrepreneur, whose net worth is estimated at nearly $4 billion,…

Billionaire Groupon founder Eric Lefkofsky is back with another IPO: AI health tech Tempus

TechCrunch Disrupt showcases cutting-edge technology and innovation, and this year’s edition will not disappoint. Among thousands of insightful breakout session submissions for this year’s Audience Choice program, five breakout sessions…

You’ve spoken! Meet the Disrupt 2024 breakout session audience choice winners

Check Point is the latest security vendor to fix a vulnerability in its technology, which it sells to companies to protect their networks.

Zero-day flaw in Check Point VPNs is ‘extremely easy’ to exploit

Though Spotify never shared official numbers, it’s likely that Car Thing underperformed or was just not worth continued investment in today’s tighter economic market.

Spotify offers Car Thing refunds as it faces lawsuit over bricking the streaming device

The studies, by researchers at MIT, Ben-Gurion University, Cambridge and Northeastern, were independently conducted but complement each other well.

Misinformation works, and a handful of social ‘supersharers’ sent 80% of it in 2020

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Okay, okay…

Tesla shareholder sweepstakes and EV layoffs hit Lucid and Fisker