GM’s Maven Car-Sharing Platform Called Easily Scalable to 2.5 Million Vehicles

General Motors based the January 2016 founding of Maven, its car-sharing business, on the “thesis” that the “traditional ownership model is dead” among 30-year-old millennials, GM Vice President Julia Steyn told a Barclays automotive investors conference Thursday. For those consumers, the traditional model of buying and using cars is “not efficient,” she said. “This is not the future.” Millennials just won’t “be buying cars that sit there 95 percent of the time idle,” she said. Maven is “building out a purpose-built system” that’s 170,000 subscribers strong, 80 percent of them millennial, she said. In just under three years, Maven “created what took the startups in the Silicon Valley years to do,” she said. “We are built to be able to scale this business.” The platform is available in 20 U.S. cities, she said. Though GM is not disclosing financial specifics about Maven, “we believe that we can easily get to 50 billion monetizable shared miles and get 2.5 million cars on the platform,” she said.