GM: Give the Car Away, Sell the Connection
Burney Simpson
GM has fully embraced ridesharing and car-sharing as the future of consumer ground travel, according to comments last week from three top executives.
Consider this from Mary Barra, GM’s chairman and CEO, during the automakers 2015 fourth quarter conference call with analysts. She begins with a quick recap of a great quarter — revenues of $40 billion, record net income of nearly $10 billion. But what does she want to talk about?
GM’s $500 million investment in Lyft.
“We gained considerable momentum in the fourth quarter and early this year on game-changing personal mobility initiatives. First, let’s talk about ridesharing.
“Our announcement with the strategic alliance with Lyft is very significant because we believe together we can work and put an autonomous fleet of sharing vehicles available for use quicker than anyone else. We also believe in the short term the arrangement that we have with Lyft will allow us to capitalize on providing and being a preferred provider for short-term-use vehicles for Lyft drivers that will support not only General Motors’ performance, but also Lyft’s performance.”
These on-demand transportation services are growing as the young and urban populations decide they don’t want to own a car, and they aren’t satisfied with expensive, highly-regulated cab companies.
Barra noted that GM has a carpooling pilot in Shanghai with 500 employees. And she gives a plug to its just-launched Maven car-sharing service, now operating in Ann Arbor, Mich., and set to begin in New York City and Chicago.
Now check out this interview with Jon Lauckner, GM’s CTO and chief of its venture capital group.
“So Lyft is built off of the concept that the automotive ecosystem is changing. We’ve had this owner-driver model in place for I don’t know how many years. Now we see ride-sharing really gaining traction,” Lauckner told Business Insider.
“We see the startup companies in this country. We see ridesharing in Israel. We see it starting to take hold in South America. And so we see this as not a phenomenon that is not unique to the US. In fact, every geography has experienced this whole concept of ride sharing,” he said.
AUTOMOBILE AS DIGITAL PLATFORM
To Lauckner, GM began creating the connected-vehicle future in the 1990s with the introduction of its OnStar communications service providing emergency, navigation, and security products. OnStar’s connected capabilities have been limited but that is changing as GM expands its 4G LTE services.
Lauckner is looking a few years ahead, when the combination of GM and Lyft, along with the coming connected capabilities brought by 5G technology, means selling wireless services to vehicle riders of all stripes.
“(The automobile) has been directly tied to connectivity. Connectivity has opened a lot of doors to create an automobile as a digital platform,” said Lauckner.
Meanwhile, at the Connected Cars USA 2016 conference in Washington, D.C., GM’s Harry M. Lightsey said the Lyft and GM deal represented “the future of personal mobility” with the two partners one day offering a ride-sharing service with on-demand autonomous vehicles.
GM believes car-sharing and ridesharing will “grow substantially. We want to be part of that. We see ourselves as a personal mobility company,” said Lightsey, GM’s executive director of global connected customer experience.
He came to the automaker from ATT, where he experienced the sometimes stodgy telecom industry transformed by technology.
“Before I left ATT, we were no longer a land-line firm. We’d became a wireless firm. You see the auto industry doing the same thing,” said Lightsey,
GM is changing and could one day “sell the connection, and give the car away,” said Lightsey. “Ride sharing is kind of like that. We have to be open to all possibilities.”
Photos copyright GM. Cadillac CT6 2016 offers a number of connectivity features, including 360-degree camera view, Enhanced Night Vision, park assist, 4G LTE with WiFi.
