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.”

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  • DesertNative In hindsight, it's fascinating to see how much annual re-styling American cars received in the 1950's. Of course, that's before they had to direct their resources to other things like crash-worthiness, passenger safety, pollution controls, etc. It was a heady time for car designers, but the rest of us have benefited immeasurably from the subsequent changes.
  • Cprescott Aside for how long it takes to charge golf carts since I don't live in a place where I can have my own charger, is the game that golf cart makers play when your battery fails and they blame you and charge you $15-25k to replace them.
  • Legacygt I am somewhat tired of hearing complaints about the fuel economy of 3-row crossovers. Particularly since they all get pretty much the same. In this class, the Highlander Hybrid gets excellent fuel economy. Beyond that, it's hard to complain about one when they're all within a couple mpgs of each other.
  • SCE to AUX "we had an unprecedented number of visits to the online configurator"Nobody paid attention when the name was "Milano", because it was expected. Mission accomplished!
  • Parkave231 Should have changed it to the Polonia!