Ridecell
Reinventing Carsharing as a Modern (and Profitable) Service
This paper analyzes the best methods for quickly launching or reinventing new mobility services such as carsharing and for scaling them to achieve maximum profitability.
- Learn how vehicle utilization in new mobility services drives profitability and which techniques can help achieve the highest utilization rates.
- Learn what’s required to launch a new mobility service offering, including end-to-end workflow, dispatch, scheduling, balancing supply/demand, CRM, and payments.
- Learn what’s the best way to prepare for the autonomous future.
- Examine lessons learned from launching one of the largest car sharing programs in the US market.
The Intersection of the Sharing Economy and Autonomous Transportation
The extended automotive industry is entering a period of unprecedented disruption due to two forces: the sharing economy and autonomous vehicle technology.
Over the past decade, ridesharing services (such as Ola, Uber, and Grab) and carsharing services (such as Zipcar, car2go, and ReachNow) have proliferated in many urban areas. By providing on-demand, point-to-point mobility, these shared services already represent attractive alternatives to car ownership. Meanwhile, automakers, technology giants, and startups are in a global race to develop and deploy self-driving vehicles. As autonomous technology rapidly improves and governments work to provide the necessary regulatory structures, self-driving vehicles are no longer seen as a possibility, but an inevitability.
Shared mobility services have introduced consumers to concepts that will underpin the future of mobility: on-demand access, sharing vehicles and space within vehicles, and per-mile pricing. Autonomous vehicles will greatly accelerate the growth of shared mobility service models, thus enabling autonomous mobility-as-a- service. As consumers opt for the convenience and experience of autonomous services, the personal car ownership paradigm that has defined the automotive industry from the past century will steadily dissolve.
Autonomy will accelerate shared mobility from evolution to revolution. For consumers, the revolution will offer greater convenience, time savings, cost savings, and new experiences not yet imagined. For automakers, dealers, and other potential new mobility service providers, this future will bring massive challenges and opportunities.
The Path to Autonomous – Mobility-as-a-Service
The number of global miles travelled in vehicles is projected to nearly double between 2015 and 2030, while global vehicle production is not expected to keep pace. In addition, many cities are already facing major congestion issues, so doubling the number of vehicles on the road is neither viable nor attractive. For this reason, shared miles will become an increasingly appealing and natural solution. In 2015, only 4% of global miles travelled were shared, but Morgan Stanley estimates that proportion to quadruple by 2030.
Shared mobility is growing quickly even before autonomous vehicles are widely deployed. Still, the average per-mile cost of ridesharing services remains two to three times higher than owning and operating a personal vehicle.
Autonomous vehicles will eliminate the human driver from the equation, which could immediately bring the estimated cost per mile of an autonomous ridesharing service to parity with a personally owned vehicle. Even in the early days of autonomous vehicles, this significant cost reduction will entice many consumers to forgo personal car ownership and instead opt for the convenience and experience of autonomous mobility.
