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]