With the removal of registration stickers some years ago, many dealerships and businesses have been caught out by employees driving a stock vehicle or a service vehicle that is unregistered. Unfortunately, the driver is ultimately responsible for checking whether a car is registered which is made more difficult by the absence of registration stickers.

The fine in South Australia for an unregistered vehicle can be as high as $7500. With so many vehicles and vehicle movements within a dealership, there is a huge risk of a vehicle unintentionally being driven while unregistered.

However, there is an easy, efficient and accurate way to check a dealers fleet and their service customer cars for expired registration. A web crawler, is an automated program that mimics an internet user looking for information, data or content to either index (like Google) or retrieve information.

Using Apify, some dealers have created a web crawler that visits the EzyReg website (SA online registration website) enters the Rego number of the stock unit or customer service vehicle and returns the rego expiry date or unregistered status.

The result of the crawler can then be integrated into an Automated CRM followup system where the customer is notified via email and SMS that their vehicle is unregistered or expiring soon. Notifications are also sent automatically to staff to notify them of customers who are unregistered. Notifications are also sent to rego clerks to remind them of upcoming expiry regos. 

Potentially saving dealers 10’s of thousands, while only costing hundreds of dollars.

Tell me an industry that has more data than Automotive retail….. I can’t think of any. Whether it be via new or used vehicle sales or vehicle servicing, a modern-day dealership reaches thousands of customers per month. Multiplied across the industry, it is likely that majority of the Australian population interacts with a car dealership at least once per year.

But what makes the data captured by dealerships even more interesting is the quality and depth of its data. To service, sell, register, finance, insure, trade-in, repair and market an expensive item like a car, a dealership must get varied, detailed and accurate data from its customers.

This trove of useful data and their high revenues are the primary reasons why they are increasingly being targeted by hackers and criminals. https://www.autonews.com/finance-insurance/retailers-prime-targets-data-theft. It’s a bit sad that hackers are extracting more data from dealers than the dealers themselves!

But why is this?

The primary reason is because most dealerships data isn’t centralised and worse still, isn’t interconnected. The Payrol system doesn’t talk to the DMS, the DMS doesn’t interact with the prospecting system, the prospecting system doesn’t relate with the OEM, the OEM doesn’t communicate with the finance company, the test drive app doesn’t talk to the document storage solutions etc.

To make matters worse, a lot of these stakeholders discourage the free movement of data between systems and therefore create these disparate data siloes. They believe THEY own a dealers data. When they do allow data connections, they often have a short-term focus on high fee’s, which discourages new entrants and innovation.  

DMS providers are unlikely to change their business model anytime soon, so dealers will have to start taking back their data….. And then use it.

The most topical use of block chain is the digital asset Bitcoin and is made infamous by its run-away valuation which is now approaching a previously inconceivable capitalisation over US$1 Trillion. But how does blockchain work and why has it added value to Bitcoin and more recently Ethereum (and many more).

Essentially, a Blockchain is an electronic ledger that records participants and timestamps whenever a transaction takes place between two parties, the transactions (or blocks) are then linked in a chain which can then be refenced to discover the history or to verify the owner of the asset.

What makes the blockchain special and valuable, is that transactions are verified by a network of 3rd parties (not by a centralised authority) by using computing power and cryptology to securely record and ensure that every transaction is correct. 3rd parties then cross-reference their record to ensure that each new ‘block’ is accurate and as long 51% of 3rd party participants agree then the ledger is confirmed and added to the blockchain.  

Miners or validators are incentivised to use their computing power for this validating task (Proof-of-work) because they are rewarded with new coins in the chain, therefor closing the link and perpetuating the sustainability of the system. Therefore, validating comes at a cost.  

A huge negative of using blockchain to verify transactions is the ever increasing computation power being funnelled into hashing (or mining). As the price of crypto-currencies increase, so does the incentive to throw more computing power to verifying transactions.

A more recent innovation is to use the validating power of the blockchain to also issue smart contracts, these smart contracts can record the authenticity and transactions of anything digital but also assets in the physical world. A car, for example could be recorded on a blockchain network so it’s true owner could be verified, essentially replacing the vehicle registration and contract system we have today.

However, with a car you don’t just want to record that a transaction has taken place, you would also want to validate the type of car, Make, model, the VIN, colour, odometer, maybe even the condition. With this added complexity the cost of validating and verifying would also increase.

Today, most cars are transacted every 5 years or so. Therefor the efficiency gains from a decentralised ledger does not add much value to the vehicle transaction and besides, the cost of registration is mostly government taxes rather than raw transaction costs. However, trust could be improved between transacting parties (especially in private vehicle sales) when an autonomous blockchain ID is linked to a drivers licence, mobile phone or other physical identifiers.  

The use of blockchain could also facilitate car sharing where the legal owner of a vehicle could then easily sell fractional ownership of the vehicle or use a ledger to record sharing of their vehicle asset with minimal fuss or expense. This could appeal to those users who would prefer to not deal with a centralised platform and reveal their identity, which would only be disclosed in the event of an accident or dispute. This functionality could be hard-coded into the smart contract, which is made possible by Ethereum. Of course, this is all theoretical, whether this would be made possible by a Government is an entirely different blog post.

At the time of its creation, Bitcoin was not designed to incorporate smart contracts into its transactions, therefore Ethereum (or something like it) is the only platform that could record future vehicle transactions. Elon Musk and Tesla has recently built up a position of over $1.5B Bitcoin, has he bet on the wrong horse?

Excel SalesLogs are an excellent way of tracking your sales performance of individuals but also of the overall team and their common target. They are also commonly used to plan deliveries and act as a source of truth for many dealership sales departments.

Despite, all the data being available in a DMS, dealerships still create custom spreadsheets to measure, compare and track their daily, weekly and monthly sales performance. Does it matter?

For a number of reasons, it doesn’t make sense for dealerships to persist with siloed spreadsheets. Ideally, a Dealer Management System should have a detailed and flexible sales log that just represents the data already inputted into a format that Dealers want. This is obviously not happening, or they wouldn’t be going to the effort to create complex spreadsheets.

Stop using spreadsheets!

They are inefficient. Your sales team has already entered in the data, whether it be the sales contract or other means, it is a waste of everyone’s time to re-enter the data just to produce a report that should be automatic.

If you add up all the hours these spreadsheets cost in inputting and maintenance, is the data that is extracted really that important?

They are not secure. Because spreadsheets have the flexibility of macros imbedded into their code architecture, they can be easily customised and automated to complete tasks. This is fantastic, but it is also a security risk. Hackers, frequently target business computer users with phishing emails which often have word and excel documents attached, which then have macros programmed to exploit a companies IT infrastructure. The best way of combating this is to have a network policy of preventing macros on all devices, however this can prevent many useful spreadsheets from operating.

In addition, these spreadsheets are often full of useful data and customer information which in the wrong hands could become a target of ransomware.   

The data is siloed. By having a dedicated spreadsheet for sales performance and delivery information, this data often sits in the spreadsheet never to be referenced or cross joined to other useful data. For example. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could compare and combine your sales delivery performance with your finance performance? Or easily understand which customers have a finance application pending? Or, measure the total income generated by your salesperson including aftermarket, finance and vehicle gross?

They are not historical. Often, SalesLogs are workbooks with tabs setup for individual branches or months. By having this data housed within individual spreadsheets, it is very difficult to compare that data to previous years or even months. 

Ditching the spreadsheet could be the best decision you make this year.  

As a data company, it has been asked why we started with a dealer test drive product as our first offering? The simple answer is that every dealership does test drives, but hardly any use the valuable data that is created.

Many Dealer Management Systems (DMS) do a poor job of offering a compelling test drive solution that is easy to use and connects the other data that is relevant to provide actionable insights into a dealerships business. As a consequence, many dealerships use the flawed metric of prospects to sales conversion. The biggest flaw with this metric is that as more focus is placed on this conversion, salespeople often pre-judge what a prospect ‘is’ and as a consequence less prospects are logged over time. Magically, improving their sales conversation to the industry norm of 33%. 

Unlike prospects, there is no grey area on what a test drive is and with an integrated system this data is easily compared to other data within the dealership. As a result, test drive to sales conversation is a much more robust, consistent and accurate metric to measure and compare a dealers business and the salespeople within.     

Whilst there is a handful of test drive applications available on the market today, they don’t offer an easy method to capture sales success and therefore many dealerships don’t consistently log the crucial data of sales conversion and subsequently don’t have an understanding how effective their sales team are performing. In addition, with an incentive to under-report prospects visiting the dealership, it is often the case that customer follow-up suffers as a result.

Test drives are great insight into what salespeople are confident with their product knowledge, who are proactively demonstrating the product range and when compared to sales, which salespeople are most effective in closing and getting a commitment from their clients.  

Our mission is to integrate test drive data with sales and other important data in a seamless manner, if it’s not seamless then salespeople wont fully embrace and use the feature and therefor data integrity is compromised.

Firstly I should point out that I am not an expert in machine learning, but I think I know enough to give you a simple explanation. Because at its core, Machine Learning is simple.

It is important however, to point out exactly what Machine Learning is and what it isn’t. Machine Learning isn’t Artificial Intelligence (AI). Intelligence infers learning and applying that to new and completely different and creative situations, Machine Learning only has limited capacity in different situations.

I have two young children and when they were very young (<2 years old) I found it fascinating how they would learn by pointing at objects and people, as parents we would respond “tree”, “dog”, “bird”. After time they would repeat back verbalising as they pointed at objects, slowly refining what they pointed at and making less mistakes. This is Machine Learning. In time, humans progress past this type of learning and become more intelligent.

Feeding examples of images, words or data and labelling those pieces of data into a neural network is what Machine Learning is today. If you give the model enough data and accurate labelling, it can provide predictions based on the patterns that the neural network detects with new data, even if it has never seen that exact data before.

Machine Learning has produced many breakthroughs that we take for granted today, for example Speech Recognition, Translation, Text Recognition (OCR) and more recently object detection and soon fully Autonomous cars.

The biggest downside of Machine Learning is the huge samples of data that are needed and the human input required to label that data accurately. As mentioned before, humans are the greatest Machine Learners on the planet, so who better to teach the machines.

This can take a lot of time and can be expensive. But innovative ways have been created to make labelling less laborious. The best systems for data labelling are the ones that get humans to label text or images without ever knowing it. Remember the reCaptcha (the squiggly letters)? The problem that was being solved was to stop automated bots from accessing websites, but the scaled solution was teaching a machine to learn letters that had previously been missed by its OCR models. Humans were inadvertently teaching a machine! And in the process digitising books and archives.

early machine learning input

More recent examples are spotting images of road signs, stop lights and pedestrian crossings. You are actually teaching self-driving cars objects that are found along the pathways of an Autonomous Car.

Raw computing power and the ever-increasing storage of data is the primary reason Machine Learning is starting to become widespread within many technology solutions today. Whereas in the past you would have to write a program to recognise many different nuances, scenarios and data relationships, not to mention the foresight to recognise those patterns in advance. Today you can simply feed in well labelled data and ‘teach’ your machine to do a task.

Amazing future solutions are imagined to be, spotting cancers in scans, better weather forecasting, more efficient case law and detecting fraud in banking.

At drivible our intentions are a little less ambitious, but just as revolutionary for car dealers. We have begun to use Machine Learning within our program to more efficiently process test drives and soon will use our expertise to organise dealer’s data and sales processes.

The future is very exciting.    

“Change is as good as a holiday”. It is an odd saying, especially at the moment. I think everybody is sick of the constant change that is happening in the world currently and comparing it to a holiday?! Nothing could be as a good as a holiday right now.

But today, that is exactly what we are going to do here at drivible – change.   

We have spent the past 12 months in the burgeoning business of car subscriptions and have found the whole experience exciting, followed by frustrating and ending with contemplation. There is no doubt that car subscriptions will become part of the mix of how consumers access a car, but we have become sceptical that it will become mainstream and becoming mainstream is what we have based our aspirations on.  

Sure, we could have been patient and slowly built up the business but the car subscription market is actually quite saturated already, remarkable considering consumers haven’t shown any appetite to embrace car subscriptions in any meaningful number.

When we jumped into car subscriptions, we did so with an underlying opinion that the car buying process was flawed - as it wasn’t a pleasurable and efficient experience for many customers AND dealerships. We thought car subscriptions could be the product that breaks down these barriers, but without mainstream adoption this is unlikely to be the case.

So today, we are changing our focus to provide products and services that help dealers efficiently serve their customers. If we do our job properly, you wont even know we exist. But our mission has not waivered, we are still resolute to make sure the dealership experience can be as pleasurable and seamless as possible.

Our first product is a test drive and loan car application that uses machine learning technology and SMS to seamlessly and without any contact allow a customer to test drive or receive a loan car at a dealership. Our aim is to facilitate this process in a mere 10 seconds, which will allow the salesperson to spend more time presenting the vehicle and the customer more time to evaluate their choices.   

In the coming months, we will further develop our capabilities to process a number of customer interactions within the dealership and ultimately our aim is for customers to be able to buy a car with all the information they need with none of the wasted time.

If you would like to join us on this new and exciting phase of the business, please contact us at hello@drivible.com.au

It appears that no matter the challenges involved in getting a car to completely drive itself, they are nothing compared to the ingenuity and self-belief of our tech savours (Silicon Valley engineers). While the progress of humankind is likely to solve the many challenges of level-5 autonomy (driving with no human input), it is likely that many of the unforeseen challenges and consequences will take longer to solve than the challenges solved thus far. Here are some of the challenge we don’t think are going to be fixed anytime soon…

Congestion

There is a lot of speculation that congestion in our cities will reduce because people will go from owning a car to using a car sharing service, this will free up parking garages as people won’t need their car during the day or when they are at work. While this may reduce the overall number of cars, it is unlikely to reduce congestion and will probably make it worse.

There is a very real possibility that congestion may increase as cars that would normally be left dormant will now be on the road looking for a rider. Or for privately owned autonomous cars, they will be travelling home empty to wait at home until the afternoon pickup. 

Charging

It is speculated that most autonomous and electric cars will be more suited and more economic for congested cities rather than rural areas or urban sprawl and this makes sense. However, cities are the most difficult areas to keep electric cars charged and ready as many people don’t have off-street parking, many people don’t own their roof, making solar generation and battery storage unlikely for most. Requiring large parking and charging garages will likely be necessary, contradicting predictions that parking garages will become obsolete.   

Systemic failure

The hardest consequence to predict is a possible systemic failure. While human drivers are fallible, we are all bad drivers in our own individual way meaning that we are unlikely to all make the exact same mistake on the road. Individualistic and chaotic systems have served humans and nature well, they create paradoxically stable systems overall. However, when you remove millions of individual decisions being made on the road and replace it with one decision logarithm the consequences could be diabolical.     

A nightmare scenario could be thousands of cars plunging off a ravine like lemmings because of some bug or miscalculation that only occurs because of the autonomous cars interaction with other autonomous cars. i.e. an individual autonomous car wouldn’t make the same error in isolation, but it’s interaction with others causes some unforeseen feedback loop.  

This is a science fiction nightmare and it’s scary to think about.

Blackouts & Disasters

I was fortunate to be driving home from work in what was considered to be an apocalyptic blackout in Adelaide on the 28th of September 2016. It was caused by a once in a 50 years storm and a main transmission connector line being flattened by high winds that left the majority of the state (about 1.7 million residents) without power. There are many reasons for the cause of the debacle, which I don’t want to go into here.

The weather that day was horrible, with rain pelting the windscreen, wind blowing debris onto the road and all major traffic lights on my commute totally blank on my 30-minute commute. Because of the sheer number traffic lights down, the police had no way of policing and regulating traffic through the major intersections that I needed to pass through that night.

So, what happened? Chaos? Crashes? Violence?

Not at all, in fact I don’t even recall hearing a beeping horn. Drivers just nudged their way through the intersections giving way where they seemed appropriate, taking turns to pass through the intersections that normally handle up to 50,000 vehicle per day. While we always assume that technology can do a better job than a human, faced with a complicated and nuanced scenario, humans generally do a pretty good job.

I can’t help but wonder, what will happen in the future with autonomous cars trying to negotiate an intersection that has no rules? Sure, some clever spark will write a logarithm to deal with downed lights, but no one disaster scenario is likely to be the same. Or, what would happen if all the communications went down for a period? I assume the autonomous cars would carefully stop in traffic while the riders just wait for communications to be restored. I can’t think of anything more frustrating!

Even more worrying, what happens when people need to evacuate a hurricane or bushfire? I can’t help but think of the confusion and helplessness that people might experience when a fleet of robo-taxi’s are tasked with evacuating large populations all at the same time and all in the same direction.

Freedom

The transition to autonomous cars has been compared to the disruption that automobiles had on the horse and cart, but I believe this will be a much bigger impact to society. When we ditched the horse and embraced the steering wheel, at least we gained more control over where we wanted to go, when and how, and as a bonus, we reduced the likelihood of being kicked in the face by a horse. A computer may be better at driving than the average human, but people will be receding control and it always feels more comfortable to be driving verses travelling in the passenger seat.  

In addition to the perceived loss of control, there is a very real threat that humans may need to be segregated from robot cars just like factory workers are with their fellow robot workers. There are already predictions that human drivers may be banned from entering certain areas of future cities and special walkways for pedestrians will need to be erected as to make the life of robot cars easier and more predictable.

This isn’t the way technology is supposed to be. We shouldn’t have to yield our freedoms to make technology work better, it should adapt to us. 

So many goods and services are bought on the internet these days that it almost seems arcane to buy something looking at someone and not a screen. So why is it still not possible to buy a car on the internet?

There are two big obstacles still preventing online purchases, but once they have been solved there is no reason why some people won’t.

The biggest obstacle is the sales process at the dealership. The ability to negotiate the price at a dealership and potentially ‘save’ thousands means that most people won’t want to buy a car online knowing that they could have saved money. Even if the dealer has an online only price, the perception of the consumer is that they could have always got an extra $100 or so dollars out of the salesperson.

Proof of this, is the sometimes sale of special supply-restricted models offered by manufacturers as an online only model, think Subaru BRZ or recently the Toyota Supra. These companies know they have a massive demand for these cars with little supply. So, they sell these cars online only as they recognize that they can sell these models at no discount and they recognize that the consumer won’t batter an eyelid.  

The only way to encourage online sales, is to have a fixed price across the dealer network so that the advertised price is the same as the transaction price and likewise the online price. i.e. there is no disadvantage to a consumer wanting to buy online. An example is Tesla and its control of the whole process including the retail of vehicles. They have proven what can be achieved online.

In New Zealand, both Honda and Toyota have transitioned to an ‘Agency’ Model, where the distributor holds all trading stock and hence controls the sale price. Consumers aren’t worse off because the advertised price came down to the transaction prices that were being offered by dealers anyway. But this model has ensured that both these brands are ready for online sales in the future.  

The next obstacle is that buying a car is a major purchase and subsequently most consumers prefer to test drive a car before they buy. If the car has a fixed price, why would a consumer test drive the car at the dealership and not buy if they are happy with the car?

For consumers to completely do their research online and progress to purchasing online, then the potential ‘buyers remorse’ issue will need to be resolved. Like how clothes and now shoes were encouraged to migrate online, these businesses offered free shipping and free returns to remove the risk of a consumer buying the wrong item. This then increased the volume of sales done online and made up for any increased shipping and return costs.

Sorry for the plug! – but at drivible our mission is to make the whole car experience seamless and to reduce the risk to such an extent that consumers and dealers feel comfortable selecting and transacting a car online. By transacting a car through a subscription, drivible can ensure that the official subscription price is the best price possible, whilst limiting the risk that you select the wrong car by only having a rolling monthly commitment.

Once consumers are comfortable with the subscription option, it is only natural that this model will migrate online.     

A recent survey by the RAA found that the average weekly cost of a typical car increased from $218.58 in 2018 to $228.79 in 2019. Most of this increase was due to rising fuel costs.

The RAA survey looked at the running costs of more than 140 models across 14 categories, including small, medium and large cars, utilities, SUVs and people movers. The cheapest vehicle was a Kia Picanto, which costs $111.49 a week to run. On the opposite side of the scale was the Tesla Model S with a weekly bill of $562.70.

But as the Tesla uses no fuel and doesn’t need as many regular services, why does it cost so much to drive every week? Answer - Depreciation

By far, the largest single weekly car expense is the amount that your car reduces in price every day, week and month. This was acknowledged in the survey, “Depreciation is the biggest budget killer and tends to become painfully apparent when motorists realise how much they’ll get for their trade-in car compared to its price when new’’.

When buying any car but especially new, you must consider all the running costs of the car. But how does the average person work out the future residual value? The easiest estimation is to look at previous models on websites such as Autotrader.com.au and Carsales.com.au and calculate the average price now versus the RRP price when the car was originally sold. This can be a good indication, especially if the model you are looking at has been in the market a few generations and the nameplate is well known. But, if the model is new to the market you a flying blind.

However, this method is not foolproof. Manufacturer offers, dealer discounts and systemic manufacturing defaults can cause the value of a car to drop substantially in the future.

The best way to avoid such uncertainty in the future is to use a guaranteed future value product or through an all-inclusive subscription, such as drivible.

To see a full list of the RAA winners, click on the link

A lot has changed in the past 30 years and the characterisation of the sleazy salesperson is outdated. With the professionalization of the industry and the transparency that the internet has brought, salespeople today are as professional as any other. 

However, when you look at various studies, salespeople are still ranked as dishonest as lawyers, journalists, politicians and real estate agents. But is it any wonder that consumers dislike these professions? Their jobs dictate, that they must find a middle ground i.e. negotiate and most people hate negotiating!

The act of negotiating means that from the very start of a conversation both parties know that the other will try and better their position. A customer will try and save money, which they should, and a salesperson is trying to make money, which they should. A customer enters a dealership in defence mode and salesperson in attack. 

The reality is that a new car today is hardly sold for a profit, in fact a recent report by Deloitte showed that the average dealer makes just $70 per vehicle in margin after negotiation. Dealerships mostly sell cars at a loss so they can sell more finance, sell more aftermarket, service more in the future and crucially make manufacturers targets. The aim of the salesperson is to lose less money! And it is the job of every other department in a dealership to earn it back.

Sales targets often come with large bonuses attached, if the dealership doesn’t get their target, they get nothing. Therefore, the central aim for a customer is to ‘get the best price’, but unfortunately, under the current system a salesperson has no way of knowing what the best price is. It varies from day-to-day or month-to-month depending on the dealer’s relative sales to their target for that period. And customers find this lack of consistency and transparency frustrating.

The current system of buying a car is broken and isn’t serving anyone well and perhaps it is the central reason why there are so many businesses trying to ‘disrupt’ the car buying process. However, many of these disrupters just magnify the current process i.e. negotiate a car purchase harder on the customers behalf. This just amplifies the current problem, as the dealer tries even harder to earn back the money they lost through up-sells and higher service costs.

Making the dealer honest through competition is important but to create better customer outcomes, the whole buying, financing and maintenance process of a car needs to be changed

A recent report by comparethemarket has shown that the average Sydney CBD worker spends up to $14,000 a year on their car. What is most surprising about the study is that this figure was for a modest Toyota Corolla and to add to that surprise, this study did not calculate the cost of the car’s depreciation.   

A separate study by the motoring lobby in Queensland (RACQ), calculated that a typical car’s depreciation is about $100 per week.

So how can you avoid this expense?

Probably the best alternative, is public transport. It can be cheap and convenient (if you live near a station) and it allows you to save on tolls, parking, petrol and wear and tear. However if you have a car sitting at home, you have a depreciating asset that you aren’t taking advantage of.

Another alternative, is to ditch the car and use ride-share or car rentals when you aren’t using public transport. An excellent option, however if you need a car for school drop offs, shopping etc. You will soon get sick of not having the freedom that your own car can give you.

For many people, the best way to reduce your car running expenses is to choose a car that is efficient on fuel, has lower servicing costs, weighs less or has less engine cylinders (for registration in some states) or most importantly has excellent resale value (lower depreciation).

However, this can be complicated and difficult to measure. For those people wanting certainty and transparency of the true cost of owning a car, a drivible subscription can be a true alternative to car ownership. Drivible has already worked out the expected depreciation and running costs and we package that into a simple and fixed monthly payment.     

The car subscription model is in its infancy and entrepreneurs, vehicle manufacturers and consumers are just trying to get their head around what the future will look like. The reality is, no one really knows what consumers will embrace. 

As such, lots of different businesses are being launched that attempts to find out ‘will consumers shun car ownership and embrace the subscription of a car?’ But a valid question is; ‘What’s the difference between a car subscription and renting a car?’.

For many new subscription services being launched, very little. The ability to use a car for a short period of time has been available for over 100 years through rental companies. While most people use rental cars for holidays or to complete a specific job, there is no reason why rental car fleets can’t be used for those consumers wanting a bit of variety and also want to avoid commitment. The question should be, why haven’t they?

The downside of rental fleets and some new entrants to the subscription business, is that they often have dated cars with dated technology and with many kilometres of use. 

So, you would have to agree that some new car subscriptions sure do look a lot like renting a car. There is obviously a market for these types of businesses and some consumers will enjoy the ability to have an SUV one month and a convertible the other, but is this just an attempt to re-brand the established rental market?

The challenge will be to offer a car subscription that will give the consumer all the upside of car ownership; huge choice of makes, models, colours, features and accessories that suits their needs and lifestyle. While also eliminating the downsides of car ownership such as depreciation & commitment.  

With the rise of automation, many in the industry believe we are only years away from getting fleets of robo-taxis that will ferry us away to our meetings, parties, workplaces, schools and dinners. The reality is, the technology, infrastructure and regulation all need to change first and this is unlikely to be a mere “few years away”.

But when all the factors line up and cars do have the ability to drive themselves, will everyone just book rides through ride-share apps? There is no doubt that some people who live in inner-city areas will be perfectly happy with ride-share as their only transport method, but large segments of society will still wish to own (or subscribe) to a specific car.

For many people cars aren’t just for getting from A to B, cars are used for storing sunglasses, nappy bags, prams, used coke cans, footballs, shoes, phone charges and mints. They can feel like our second home. If you have kids, are you really going to re-install child seats every time you get into a ride-share?

So the methods by which people have access to cars is going to become more fragmented, some people will 100% ride-share but large numbers of society will need 100% access to a car, 100% of the time.

Perhaps some families will own or subscribe to one car and then use a ride-share service for any other trips, but the complete death of car ownership is greatly exaggerated.