Car companies are getting quite excited about ride-sharing and car-sharing services – and the profits that are yet to be pulled from the planet’s parked cars – around a billion of them.
Industry analysts reckon that about 95% of these vehicles spend their lives static. Parked up, losing money, and vastly under-utilised.
It’s a prospect that some fairly big players are already investing in – Toyota recently chalked a deal with Uber and managed to keep the figure quiet; Volkswagen poured 300m euros into taxi app Gett on the same day earlier this year that General Motors took a US$500m punt on Lyft, one of Uber’s more serious competitors.
Morgan Stanley analyst Laura Lembke told an automotive conference in Munich last week that it could well be time to make the move from thinking of the car business as a service – it could dramatically change the bottom line.
New car sales worldwide account for about 80m a year and bring in around $1.5 trillion.
But with a billion cars ‘in stock’ around the world, and the cost of a trip is $1 a mile the total market value could be worth $10 trillion.
IHS senior analyst of automotive techology Jeremy Carlson says it is too early to accurately asses the relatively young industry, and points out that car manufacturers might be using their investments as a way of quickly gaining knowledge.
“Yes, this has the potential and the likelihood to impact the traditional automotive business model at least in some capacity,” he conceded to phys.org.
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