Fractional SUV Ownership: It's An Idea Whose Time Has Finally Come

Now it can be told: About ten years ago, my pal Rodney was an employee at NetJets, a Berkshire Hathaway Company(™). Not for long, however. He was fired for making a very specific suggestion to his female boss. TTAC is a family-friendly site, so the best way I can rephrase what he said would be this: “If you (meaning the boss) were to let me (meaning Rodney) aggressively sodomize you in the company bathroom, not only would you experience a form of pleasure with which you are currently not acquainted, it would also result in a significant change in your management style, for the better, particularly as it relates to me, as you would then experience submissive feelings whenever you spoke to me.”

I should point out that Rodney was speaking from honest experience here, having convinced at least two other women in the corporation to participate in similar activities.

“This time, however, I was the one who got f***ed,” Rodney mournfully confessed to me a few days later. “The worst part is that this put a real crimp in my plans for Obsidian Black.”

“Obsidian Black?” I replied, like I’d been the recent recipient of a traumatic brain injury.

“Obsidian Black,” Rodney clarified.

That’s too pricey for a lot of people, even a lot of wealthy people, so NetJets has the subsidiary MarquisJet card product. You give them $150,000 or thereabouts and you can use 25 hours on a plane in the NetJets fleet.

Rodney’s idea, “Obsidian Black”, worked like so: He’d buy a MarquisJet card and split it up further. Down to the individual hour. Then he’d sell those hours to wealthy African-Americans who wanted to try a private jet for a flight to Vegas or something like that. Strictly speaking, the MarquisJet card prohibits exactly that, but Rodney figured that if NetJets called him on it he’d claim that he was being racially discriminated against and the drama would be squashed in a hurry.

“The primary issue,” he explain, “is finding people in my, ahem, community who have ten grand to spend on a one-hour private jet flight.”

“That’s one good candidate, out of several, for ‘the primary issue’,” was my response. “But yeah, that sounds tough.” To me, the ‘primary issue’ was finding somebody to front him the $150k, but as the B&B continually remind me, I’m no businessman. And the truth is that Rodney was ahead of his time. In 2016, there are all sorts of alternative ways to get people into a business jet on a single-use basis.

I’m not exactly sure what fractional-jet owners do with their shares. The only NetJets “owners” I personally know are two different first-generation-money Ohio families who use their shares for exactly the same thing: flying to Naples and Las Vegas on short notice. I mean the Naples in Florida, of course. I said “Ohio people”. I assume that other people have legitimate business purposes for their NetJets shares. I’m also reasonably sure that most people over-estimate how often they’ll actually use the jet, and that’s how NetJets became insanely profitable.

There’s a lot to be said for using a business jet instead of flying first class. You get to show up at the airport ten minutes ahead of time instead of two hours. You have the ability to fly directly to regional airports. If I had a ton of money, I’d have whatever kind of plane I needed to fly directly from Don Scott field in Columbus, Ohio, to the Monterey airport. It would save me between three and five hours of my life each way from the current way I get to Laguna Seca. What I’d like to suggest to you, however, is that a major part of the fractional-share purchase decision is predicated on the idea that you’ll be able to use the share for things that you can’t do with first-class ticket on a major airline.

Part of the appeal of a private jet is that you can leave somewhere way after midnight and get to where you’re going by morning. Or that you can change your roster of traveling companions at the last minute. Or that you can fly with things that are difficult or risky to get on a commercial flight, whether we’re talking about a triple-bagged kilo of Bolivian marching powder or a real ’59 Les Paul. Ninety-five percent of the time, however, I bet you that the fractional-share guys end up doing something that they could easily do with a commercial flight.

You want to fly from LAX to LGA or vice versa? You can do that pretty much all the time, on short notice, with plenty of luxury and special consideration available. It might be nice to imagine that you’re going to smuggle a thousand Krugerrands from the Cayman Islands to Jackson Hole, but when it comes time to actually do that shit you’re gonna change your mind, because the kind of people who earn and keep fortunes in the modern era tend to be hugely averse to actual, physical risk.

Does this contrast between the adventurousness of the original purchase decision and the prosaic nature of actual use sound familiar to you? Of course it does. Every day in this country, millions of people commute by themselves in a 4,500-pound, 18-mile-per-gallon cage that they bought because it met their perceived future needs. These are the people who reacted to the news of my purchasing a two-door Honda Accord like I’d just had unprotected sex with Courtney Love.

“But… but… but…” they’d stutter, “…what if you have to put people back there?”

“It’s okay,” I’d say. “There are real seats back there. I checked.”

“But… what if you need to bring something back from the hardware store?”

“What if I do?”

“You should have gotten a Pilot.”

“You mean, I should have paid ten grand extra and gotten two-thirds of the fuel economy for the five times a year I visit Lowe’s?”

“Well… yes!”

“Lowe’s,” I’d respond, “rents trucks.”

“But what if… the truck has already been rented?” This last, delivered in a tone that suggests such a tragedy is not just possible, but inevitable.

“Then I’d go back another day?” There’s no reasoning with those people. They demand automotive self-sufficiency. Never mind that we all live in a society where a 45-minute power outage causes a riot and even a five-day nationwide trucking strike would have some of us organizing into armed gangs and storming the local grocery store with Bushmaster AR-15s. We easily accept the idea of living somewhere without so much as a square meter of arable land or a single seed to plant in it, but the minute you bring up the idea of owning a vehicle that cannot meet all conceivable future needs people treat you like you’ve been BASE-jumping naked off the Freedom Tower.

Sane human beings meet these needs by renting appropriate vehicles when the time arrives, but I’ve noticed that most people have an utter horror of renting vehicles. This is probably because they don’t have any control of the situation. When you’re a renter, the rental company can just tell you that they don’t have any vans for that weekend. They don’t care that Jaden, Brayden, and Caiden are all starting at State U. And there’s no appeal to a higher authority. You’re just stuck.

I think there’s some money to be made in appealing to that kind of paranoia. My idea is this: fractional SUV ownership. I buy a whole bunch of Suburbans and sell shares in them. You can get a one-quarter share in a Suburban LS for, oh, I don’t know, five hundred bucks a month. Then you go online with my system and lay out when you’ll need a Suburban. I’ll guarantee availability of “your” truck. If you need one in a hurry? Chances are that I’ll be able to hook you up. After all, you’re a valued owner.

The most popular product will be the one-sixteenth share of a Suburban, which will be just $199 a month. That one weekend a month that you want to go to Lowe’s? I got you covered. What about your family vacation where you want to put the kids in a Suburban and drive Route 66 for a week? It’s a done deal.

Everybody is a winner. Obviously, I’m a winner, because I’m going to buy Subs at $1,000/month and effectively lease them for $2,500 a month. Then I’m gonna sell them for $20,000 when they are five years old and pocket every dime of that money. But my clients are winners, too. They’ll be free to buy the car that makes actual sense for their daily commute. Like a Civic, or a Veloster, or a Huracan for all I care. Let’s say that gas goes back up to five bucks a gallon. Commuting forty miles a day in a Civic instead of a Pilot? That’s a hundred bucks a month you’ll save right there, on fuel. Then think of the savings from buying a $20,000 car instead of a $40,000 one. Hell, some of you balls-out adrenaline freaks can do what I do, and commute every day via a Honda CB1100 that gets 44 miles per gallon even though you hit 100 mph at least once in the morning and twice in the afternoon. You could get one of those CR-Zs, if you need a roof.

And when your neighbor says something cutting about how you’re driving all alone to work every day in a 2,800-pound vehicle instead of a 5,600-pound one, you can say, “Well, of course I’m fractional with NetSuburbans. I wouldn’t bother to use anything smaller than a nine-passenger vehicle with a 1,900-pound load capacity on the weekends, just to save money.” And when you deliver that last line, squint really hard at their Terrain or Santa Fe or whatever.

Fractional SUV ownership. It’s an idea whose time has come. I just need to get Warren Buffet involved. Alternately, I could forget the whole thing and just fund whatever business idea Rodney has in mind. I still remember the last time I asked him for a business idea. He looked at me for a long time. Then he said to me, “Okay, pay attention. It starts when we find a few young mothers… with nothing to lose.”