Upshift cars are most commonly used on out of town trips
There are many new models of car use and ownership being explored. Upshift is a San Francisco startup offering what it calls fractional car subscription — a type of car-share, though they don’t call it that. Customers pay a fee to have a car for 8 days per month, for example, with roll-over. The key is the cars are delivered to them on the days needed, and picked up and cleaned after. While customers can request a car on somewhat short notice, like an hour, the vast bulk of the usage is planned further in advance, and involves trips out of town, says founder CEO Ezra Goldman.
You can see much more on this topic in this podcast interview with Goldman
Upshift wants to use some sort of automation to deliver the cars, such as remote operation or eventual limited self-driving. While true robocars for passengers are an ongoing challenge, cars that deliver themselves is an easier problem, akin to the delivery robot problem already partly solved by companies like Nuro — the cars being delivered don’t have to go fast on or every road, and can perhaps only deliver at night (as Cruise operates in its pilot.) For now, Upshift uses human who stick a small bike or scooter in the back of the car to delivery it, at higher cost, to get the service going.
Upshift has attracted a young, urban demographic, including people who are not quite able to afford a full car but sometimes need one, but they also have older users. Goldman believes our current system, where to participate in the car world requires both an expensive purchase with maintenance and other costs and the need to park the vehicle. The mid-level plan costs $500/month for 8 days/month — which is similar than the typical lease on a Prius or Rav4, though that requires an up-front payment and then insurance, maintenance and parking are extra but not needed with Upshift.
The 4 and 8 day plans are not going to satisfy any car commuter, but the 12 day plan does satisfy some are are doing partial work-from-home and only going into the office 2 days/week.
Many services target those who are not ready to own their own car, including of course standard rent-a-car, carshare programs like Zipcar and ShareNow, P2P car rental from Getaround and Turo and taxi services including Uber and Lyft — and now Waymo. Of course, alternate modes like scooters, transit, cycling and walking fill out the mobility landscape, but there is no denying that people want, and are willing to spend a lot to have personal cars, as much as urban planners may hate them.
That presents a somewhat rough set of levels of car use:
- Taxi/Uber/Robotaxi
- Self-delivered whistlecars (Halo, Vay.io)
- One-way carshare (ShareNow)
- Depot Carshare (Zipcar)
- P2P car rental (Getaround, Turo)
- Rent-a-Car (Hertz, Enterprise) (with inconvenient “pick up”)
- Fractional car lease (Upshift)
- Lease
- Car ownership
The robotaxi companies expect to eventually be a suitable car replacement, but it’s some time before they will be good for road trips or extensive trips out of town, as they don’t plan to extend service areas that far at first. In those early days, they will need to partner with companies that do carshare or rental so that people can easily get cars for such travel. Car rental has a lot of bureaucracy around it, which is why companies like Zipcar arose. In North America, airport car rental is pretty smooth — just walk into the lot and take any car — but for a long time it has been a burden.
Car rental companies offer to “pick you up” but it really means they take you back to the car rental depot to do paperwork first. It’s not the “just go” experience that companies of type 1-3, and 7-9 offer. The whistlecars try to offer that, though there is a delay getting the car to you, just as there is a delay waiting for an Uber or robotaxi, though if the car density gets high enough the wait can be quite short.
Personalization
Services 1-7 don’t let you keep stuff in the car or personalize it. You also can’t usually make intermediate stops leaving your bags in the car, which is a big negative for some people, no problem for others. Families have gravitated towards the minivan which is full of all the things they need for family travel. One often hears from parents of small children that robotaxis will never work for them because of this, though there are many cities where it is common for families to not own cars, so it is obviously not impossible.
Waymo allows riders to take a “multi leg” trip, but that just means they don’t charge the startup “flag drop” fee on the extra legs. The warn that when they do the next leg, it may be a different car — so no shopping trips picking up things at different stores. In the future, once robotaxi fleets are large enough, it will be practical to pay a modest price to have a specific vehicle wait for you at stops for a very modest fee, possibly even for hours off-peak. Services of class 4-7 give you the same vehicle all day.
Upshift’s staff do some personalization of the vehicle, setting radio stations and other settings. In the future, cars should be more amenable to this — Tesla just announced that they can transfer a driver’s profile to a new car to the point that the cell-phone key works, and drivers can just walk up to a loaner car with their phone, get in and drive with everything set like their own car.
Goldman believes Upshift’s niche will survive (and even thrive) in the robotaxi era, as will personal car ownership, with about a third of travel going to robotaxi and pay as you go related services, a third to car ownership and a third to temporary car models like Upshift. It’s certainly going to be interesting times.
