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GM is letting more people rent their cars for money

Maven’s peer-to-peer car sharing service will expand to 10 cities in the next few months

General Motors is expanding its peer-to-peer car-sharing service to 10 cities by the end of this year, the company announced today. The service, which is part of GM’s mobility arm Maven, launched this summer and is already live in Ann Arbor and Detroit, Michigan, along with Chicago and Denver. By the end of 2018, GM says, it will be available in Baltimore, Boston, Washington, DC, Jersey City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco as well.Maven’s peer-to-peer service allows owners to rent their cars by the hour or daily, and they get a 60 percent cut of the cost of each rental. The company says this can add up to hundreds — in some cases thousands — of dollars per month, depending on what car they have and how often they make it available.
For example, Maven says renting a 2018 Chevy Cruze for seven days per month can net an owner $533, while a 2017 GMC Sierra pickup truck can pull in $1,035. Those figures are based on Maven’s suggested rates, though. Owners can set their own rates for hourly or daily rentals, which affects potential earnings.
The service requires owners to have a GM car that’s model year 2015 or newer to be eligible, and their vehicle has to go through an onboarding process that takes four to six hours where keyless entry technology will be installed. Their cars can’t have any open recalls on them, and manual transmissions aren’t allowed.
Other “Airbnb for cars” type services are on the market, like Turo and Getaround. They tend to be more flexible, allowing people to rent more makes and models. But GM’s service has advantages, too, like covering up to $1 million in liability insurance. Maven also allows people to rent from a fleet of cars, much like ZipCar or Car2Go, and has another separate service that lends cars to drivers for services like Uber or Instacart. GM says Maven has booked over 186,000 reservations so far, for a total of around 338 million miles driven.

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