General Motors China has introduced a pilot program for their Shanghai employees, enabling them to carpool together using a self-developed mobile app.

Since more and more urban mobility solutions have surfaced these past couple of years, the fact that GM is enabling about 700 employees at their Shanghai headquarters to share rides with their colleagues is not only logistically sound but will also reduce emissions and congestion.

When accessing the app, drivers can input their preferred route, departure time and number of seats available, while riders will submit their commuter requests. The app will then match the riders with a list of potential drivers and once a ride is accepted (the driver needs to accept the rider first), the system will automatically upgrade the vehicle status and show that it now has one fewer available seats.

In charge of GM China’s Urban Active Projects is Vivian Yu, who said that “The employee carpooling pilot program merges the Internet with intelligent mobile technology. It will not only benefit our team members, but also enable us to test software systems in everyday usage scenarios.”

“This initiative will further expand our activities in alternate transportation models in one of our most important markets in the world. It will help us learn more about vehicle user behavior as we develop business models for future global mobility solutions,” added Julia Steyn, GM VP Urban Active.

Aside from this project, GM has recently announced their first residential car-sharing initiative, called ‘Let’s Drive NYC’ – which works by leveraging integrated and existing OnStar connectivity tech & services at the push of a button.

In Europe, Opel has launched a peer-to-peer sharing service called CarUnity, which sees both dealers and their fleets providing an array of available vehicles for sharing, while in China a fleet of EN-V 2.0 electric concept vehicles went to work at Shanghai Jiao Tong University earlier this year.

GM has announced that more car & ride-sharing initiatives will follow in the first quarter of 2016.

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