Is it important to you that you own a car? Some of us don’t really need the responsibility or cost of owning a car full time, but have lifestyles that require us to leave our car parked for many days or even weeks at a time, when means it’s not at all important to own a vehicle all the time. In order to help you and give you a chance to enjoy a car only when you need to ride sharing programs have been developed to give you access to vehicles around the area you live to have a car when you need it.
General Motors has announced they are launching their own ride sharing program called Maven. In recent news GM chose to partner with Lyft in San Francisco for ride sharing and eventually to invest in for their semi and fully autonomous vehicles as they come to the market. Maven offers a completely different type of ride sharing for you to enjoy that has brought together some of the advancements that have bene made by companies such as Google, Zipcar and Sidecar to give you a way to really enjoy the ride and have a way to have the car you need.
During the launch phase of this ride sharing program Maven will have cars parked in 21 different lots around the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan and offer this ride sharing to a little over 100,000 people with a focus on the faculty and students of the University of Michigan. This will give them a great test market that is close to home and the population with the right lifestyle to only need a car once in a while and not full time. The information gathered with this test market will tell GM where they need to make changes as the expand to Chicago in the first quarter of this year in a partnership with Magellan Development Group.
GM is not going to stop with these two areas as Maven will replace the Let’s Drive NYC car sharing program that is a partnership with Stonehenge Partners. Their global market offers ride sharing in Frankfurt, Berlin and in various locations in China. This has been the test market that GM has already used since the middle part of last year, giving them the right test bed for the right driving experience for those that only need a car once in a while.
The Maven ride sharing program makes it easy for you to enjoy. With the Maven app you will be able to reserve, unlock, start and heat or cool the vehicle of your choosing. The program also includes the insurance and fuel costs to make it a simple process of only making one monthly payment to cover everything that is needed to share the ride. With this program students from the University of Michigan can head home for a long weekend or on their winter breaks without having to keep a car parked on campus at all times. This certainly is a program with a great upside and GM seems to be at the forefront of making this happen.
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