A new twist on car sharing, enabled by the connected car ecosystem

By Jeremy Green, Machina Research

One of the most fascinating aspects of the connected car is the way in which it enables new business models as well as new products and services.

Car sharing is one of these. It’s provided by a wide range of companies. Some are conventional rental companies who are using connectivity to develop new service models; ZipCar, probably the best known car sharing company, is owned by Avis. Here the cars are owned by a company and rented out on a time basis. Car sharing is just a bit more flexible, and a bit less labour intensive, than a conventional renting business. Others like RelayRides are much more of a P2P online marketplace, like Airbnb for cars, connecting individuals who don’t mind making their cars available to strangers with people who want to flexibly borrow a car for a short time.

But some mainstream car manufacturers are already dipping a toe into the turbulent waters of providing ‘mobility as a service’ rather than selling boxes on wheels. It is a radical departure, and few automotive OEMs look like they are ready to give up the day job. Nevertheless, BMW already provides DriveNow in partnership with German rental company Sixt, Ford operates Ford2Go, Daimler has both Car2Go and the broader-concept Moovel, and VW has Quicar. Peugeot has the Mu rental service, while GM has partnered with RelayRides, and uses its OnStar platform and embedded technology for connectivity.

An intriguing new twist on car sharing has come from Audi; its Audi Unite service, launched in Sweden, offers a ‘personalised micro-sharing’ proposition whereby a group of individuals can collectively lease a vehicle from the company, and a combination of cloud platform, smartphone application and local signalling beacon can be used to measure the usage and share the costs.

Audi promises “transparent and convenient cost splitting between the members of the Audi unite group.” The group can decide if they would like to split the fixed cost of the car (e.g. leasing fee, insurance, tax, winter tires, service, cleaning) evenly or according to the individual usage behaviour, which most of the group chose as the option. This means, that whenever a group member books the car, drives with the car or parks it outside of the individually defined homezone, the time gets accounted to his/her bill. The unused time when the car is parked in the homezone and therefore available for the group is split evenly between all group members. Group members use a fuel card to fill up the car whenever needed and all costs are divided according to mileage.

The service concept is smart, yet also a bit weird. It’s tempting to characterize the idea as well suited to the age of automotive austerity, in which young people are increasingly delaying car purchase or avoiding it altogether.

But Audi is presenting Unite as a ‘premium’ service, and it is in essence a way to market new cars. A wide range of not-cheap vehicles are available in the program. In the company’s words, it is “concentrating on the specific requirements of premium customers. Many of them are finding the ‘shareconomy’ an inspiring idea – but out of a very specific motivation: They share not because they can’t afford something or simply want to get from A to B, but because they believe in and enjoy the shared experience.” It’s worth noting that ‘fair splitting’ has been identified by some commentators as one of the big trends for 2015.

Audi acknowledges that it doesn’t really know how this is going to turn out: “We are therefore working on new additional mobility products that offer greater flexibility while fulfilling the brand’s premium standards. We are currently in a test phase with these formats and are gathering feedback from our customers in a variety of markets so that we can examine the business case for us the manufacturer and for our dealers.”

In any case, it is a bold and brave move that deserves two cheers and further watching.

 

Thanks to Jeremy Green at Machina Research for this content

Audi to Build 1 Million ‘Connected Cars’ by 2015

By 2025, every car will be connected, according to the wireless industry trade group GSMA

Audi will be helping to reach that number by building 1 million connected vehicles by 2015, according to Mattias Ulbrich, the automaker’s chief information officer.

But Audi, which already has 200,000 connected cars on the road, isn’t starting from scratch. The luxury automaker currently offers its Audi connect package, which creates a Wi-Fi hotspot in the car and includes music streaming and a navigation system with Google Earth, Google Street View and online traffic information.

Ulbrich, at the automotiveIT Congress in Hanover, Germany, last week, said the goal of Audi’s connected-car initiatives is to increase the brand’s competitiveness by focusing on technology that’s customer-focused. “For carmakers there are three priorities,” he said. “Customers, customers and customers.”

Ulbrich added that close cooperation with parent company Volkswagen Group and its various business divisions will yield better connected services for Audi customers. But sister brand Porsche won’t be moving as speedily into the connected-car race.

Porsche is moving slower with the implementation of car connectivity than the premium auto makers, the brand’s IT manager, Sven Lorenz, said at the same conference. “That’s because our drivers really want to drive, rather than play,” Lorenz told an audience at automotiveIT.

Read the full article here

Source: Doug Newcomb | Driving the Conversation on Car Technology