- [Narrator] Living in a city with public transportation
is great.
But even the staunchest rail rider needs
his own wheels sometimes.
For the past eight years, car sharing has filled
these gaps for me in the form of Zipcar
which lets me rent any of its vehicles
by the hour or the day just by scanning in
with my membership card.
Well I recently had the opportunity
to test drive another service that does basically
the same thing but with a bit more class,
a lot more technology, for a much lower price tag.
I'm Mr. Mobile and this is Maven.
Fundamentally Maven works almost exactly like
its more established competition.
You make a reservation on your phone or computer
for a certain number of hours, choose a pickup location,
and then you go find your car.
Now where Zipcar gives you a membership card
to scan in at the start of a rental,
the entire Maven process is handled
from your iPhone or Android.
This has the advantage of streamlining
the experience.
You don't need to carry a card
that you could possibly lose or leave at home.
But it also slows things down.
You need to be within 10 feet of the car
for the app to function and on Android at least,
sometimes it takes so long to connect
that you're better off restarting the app.
Also as of press time, you need a data connection
on your phone for the unlock command to work.
So if you leave cellular coverage,
don't expect to be able to get back into your car
if you lock it.
Maven tells me this will be corrected
by the end of February 2017.
Fortunately my four days with Maven
never took me outside of T-mobile's coverage area
despite my pushing the limits of Maven's
daily mileage allowance.
I drove from the city streets of Boston
through the suburbs of New England
and crossed on a ferry to the countryside
of Long Island's East End.
This burned a lot of fuel in the gas-guzzling
Cadillac ATS I chose for my test drive.
But refueling with Maven is as free
as the insurance coverage.
There's a card above the sun visor
that most major gas stations will read
as an ordinary credit card.
The only thing you need to be ready for
is to enter your odometer reading
at each refueling of which, fyi,
isn't always the easiest thing to find
in today's computerized car cockpits.
And if all this fossil fuel talk sounds
a little last century to you and you'd rather cruise
and electric power, Maven has EVs too,
specifically the Chevy Volt, a plug-in hybrid
I tested last year.
What do Chevy and Cadillac have in common?
They're both from General Motors
which also owns the Maven brand.
So the entire rental fleet comprises GM vehicles.
And while there are a variety of models available,
most of them tend toward higher trim levels.
This is where Maven really stands apart
from Zipcar and Enterprise.
You're much more likely to find luxuries
like lane keeping and auto park, Android auto,
Apple carplay and On-star, and heated seats
and steering wheels in the Maven fleet.
These are cars that come equipped to convey you
in comfort.
Cars that can pick out their own wifi hotspots.
Cars you could impress a date with.
And the hood ornament on top of it all,
Maven is significantly cheaper than the competition,
at least for now.
While a Tahoe or a Cadillac will still charge you,
well, Cadillac prices, in my market a Chevy Malibu
or Volt is $8 an hour.
Those rates are really hard to find on Zipcar
these days.
There's also no annual membership fee on Maven.
So what's the catch?
Well, Zipcar has had over 16 years to build out
a fleet of rental cars that you can find
in over 30 metro markets, 500 college campuses,
and 50 airports across the nation.
Well, GM launched Maven just a year ago.
So if you want to find one, you need to live
in one of only seven cities.
And even then, well take my experience,
I have nine Zipcars within a one minute walk
of my front door.
But to get to the closest Maven,
I have to take a train five or six stops
and then walk 15 minutes.
I'm sure GM is keen to close that gap
as quickly as it can and as its footprint
continues to spread, I do expect the per hour prices
to climb just as they did with Zipcar.
But GM is betting that car sharing is the future
of urban transportation and given the amount
of money you can save by joining one of these services
instead of buying, insuring and fueling
your own vehicles, I'm inclined to agree.
If you're looking for a fancier, techier,
and for the moment, cheaper alternative
to the Zipcar, keep an eye on Maven
and see if it's coming to your city.
And if you do want to buy your own set of wheels,
check out my full review of the Chevy Volt
and in-depth preview of the Tesla Model Three
on the Mr. Mobile Youtube channel,
and remember to subscribe while you're there
for more videos just like this one.
Until next time, thanks for watching,
and stay mobile my friends.