General Motors Embraces Underemployment With Maven Gig
Car sharing is one of the cornerstones of automakers’ newfound focus on mobility solutions. It’s a brave new world for vehicle manufacturers, but it’s also a brave new world for consumers. With roughly 22 million American’s underemployed — that’s people with jobs that don’t provide adequate income, full-time hours, or exist outside the hire’s experience/education — many people have taken on part-time work to fill in the gaps.
Taking advantage of this unique workforce, Maven, General Motors’ mobility arm, is launching Maven Gig, providing part-timers with weekly access to its fleet of Bolt EVs. Gig functions similarly to Maven City and GM’s Express Drive partnership with Lyft, but is specifically designed for renters who don’t own a vehicle and might want to spend a week delivering pizza or working for a ride-hailing service on an extremely limited basis.
An interesting idea, but a bit of an odd duck at $229 a week. GM is pitching it as a way to “enable freelancers to earn income through multiple sources.”
“I would call it complimentary to, but also an evolution of what we’ve already been doing with the gig economy,” explained Maven’s Director of Commercial Mobility Strategy Rachel Bhattacharya in an interview with TechCrunch.
“One of the needs we kept hearing from our renters, and one of the things we’ve seen in data about how people participate as a 1099 driver is multiple platforms. We know that our customers are really looking to earn on their own terms, drive for whoever they want. Everybody has slightly different ways of earning and maximizing how they benefit from the gig economy, and we wanted to open that up.”
It’s actually kind of sad that we exist in a society where there is demand for this sort of service. But GM claims all signs point to consumers needing or choosing more freelance work in the years to come — estimating 43 percent of the U.S. workforce will be made up of freelancers by 2020.
Maven Gig launched Wednesday in San Diego and will expand to include San Francisco and Los Angeles later this year. For $229 per week, users receive access to a Bolt EV, insurance, unlimited miles, access to free charging, and routine maintenance.
[Image: General Motors]
A staunch consumer advocate tracking industry trends and regulation. Before joining TTAC, Matt spent a decade working for marketing and research firms based in NYC. Clients included several of the world’s largest automakers, global tire brands, and aftermarket part suppliers. Dissatisfied with the corporate world and resentful of having to wear suits everyday, he pivoted to writing about cars. Since then, that man has become an ardent supporter of the right-to-repair movement, been interviewed on the auto industry by national radio broadcasts, driven more rental cars than anyone ever should, participated in amateur rallying events, and received the requisite minimum training as sanctioned by the SCCA. Handy with a wrench, Matt grew up surrounded by Detroit auto workers and managed to get a pizza delivery job before he was legally eligible. He later found himself driving box trucks through Manhattan, guaranteeing future sympathy for actual truckers. He continues to conduct research pertaining to the automotive sector as an independent contractor and has since moved back to his native Michigan, closer to where the cars are born. A contrarian, Matt claims to prefer understeer — stating that front and all-wheel drive vehicles cater best to his driving style.
More by Matt Posky
Comments
Join the conversation
"It’s actually kind of sad that we exist in a society where there is demand for this sort of service." Do you contend that there is a post-industrial society where there would not be some demand for this sort of service? It's hard to imagine a time/place in the developed world where short-term commercial rentals would not find a some takers.
When I first glanced at this article, I thought it actually sounded like kind of a neat idea. Until I noticed that it was $229 per *week* and not per month. While it's possible that you might be able to make that work out financially in some areas, I don't see that happening in real life especially since it is intended to be a part-time "gig" to supplement income. Sounds like yet another something cooked up in a boardroom to target Millennials(TM) from people who have no idea what it is like to not have the money to begin with.