GM Planning A Turo Competitor With Customer-Owned Vehicles

The future of mobility continues to change and it appears General Motors wants to launch a new car sharing service.

Unlike ride-sharing and ride-hailing services, Bloomberg reports the latest service would allow GM owners to rent out their vehicles when they aren’t needed. The publication says a pilot program will kick off this summer and be launched as part of the Maven car sharing service which already allows customers to rent a vehicle for as little as $8 an hour.

The service would apparently operate pretty much the same way Maven already does but it would use customer cars instead of company-owned vehicles. In essence, GM owners would be able to add their vehicle to Maven and have people rent it. Maven would collect the fees and share some of the money with the vehicle owner.

GM declined to comment on the report but the publication says GM wants to eventually roll out the service nationwide. The service is being billed as a competitor to Turo which has grown in popularity of the past few years. As Bloomberg notes, the number of cars listed on Turo have tripled to 200,000 in the past two years while the service now boasts around five million users.

If the report pans out, it seems like a win-win situation for General Motors. The company would still make money on every rental and it wouldn’t have to deal with the expense of buying and maintaining its own fleet of vehicles.

Of course, a number of questions remain unanswered. The most important is how much the service would cost and how much vehicle owners could expect to make. If the company isn’t generous with profits, few people could list their cars on the service. Likewise, if costs are too high, people interested in renting a vehicle could simply opt for another service.