General Motors is winding down its carsharing service dubbed Maven in eight of the 17 cities in the U.S. where it is operational.
According to a report in The Wall Street Journal citing a GM spokeswoman, GM will shut down Maven in Chicago and Boston in the next few months. The spokeswoman declined to provide the paper with a list of all the cities where the service will be shutting down. Maven was launched in 2016. The carsharing service will continue operating in Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Detroit, Toronto and other cities, the spokeswoman said. “We’re shifting Maven’s offerings to concentrate on markets in which we have the strongest current demand and growth potential,” GM said. The paper noted that Chicago customers received an email that Maven will stop operations as of July 26.
GM’s Maven enables customers to rent cars on a short-term basis via a smartphone app. Maven also provides vehicles to Uber and Lyft. The Maven app is also available for private car owners to rent out their vehicles for short-term trips. In January Maven lost Julia Steyn, the head of the unit since it was launched. It wasn’t clear at the time why Steyn left the role.
GM isn’t the only vehicle maker that has scaled back its ridesharing aspirations in recent months. Ford shutdown Chariot, its private shuttle service, in January. Chariot operated van fleets in New York, San Francisco and Austin, Texas. The service failed to take off and was losing money, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal. GM’s Cadillac brand had a subscription service that let customers pay monthly to access different models, but the business failed to take off as well. It was canceled last year, but the paper reported Cadillac has plans to relaunch the service.
The moves on the part of the car markers come as Uber is struggling as well. It continues to have big losses and a stock that is trading lower since it went public via an IPO earlier in May.