What if you never bought a car again? It seems an odd thought, doesn’t it? You may have just bought your first car, your first new car or you may be 20 years down the road of regular purchases and trade-ins. But it’s always been about having your car. Yours.
Is all that soon to change? In some ways it already has. Mobile phones have for a long time now been on a buyupgrade-dispose loop and our use of them is often dependent on our needs and wants, with pay-as-you-go. Airbnb is already replacing for some of us the traditional “holiday home” and cars themselves have begun to slip our ownership grasp – buy a car on a PCP and you never really own it; it’s a lease.
Can we envisage a shift to just renting, though? And not traditional, airport-counter renting but on-demand, real-time renting. The type where you never bother owning a car but there are half a dozen parked on nearby streets which, for the consideration of a sign-up fee and an hourly rate, are yours to use as you please.
This revolution has already come to Irish shores, of course. GoCar established itself here in 2013, and its fleet and number of locations for pick-ups and drop-offs has rapidly expanded. But Yuko, launched this month, is different. Why? Because it's not a small independent start-up – it's part of Toyota, the largest and wealthiest car maker on the planet. And it's a car maker that's now seriously looking at changing utterly our relationship with cars and ownership.
Dublin is the launch city for Toyota's Yuko car-sharing club, chosen partly because it has a geographically small and manageable city centre but also because it suffers from traffic congestion and relatively poor public transport. Aiden Connolly, Toyota Ireland's head of innovation and Special Projects, told The Irish Times that the eventual direction of the Yuko project is very much going to be dictated by the people who use it.
“It’s a wonderful open dialogue with people who are using your products, who mightn’t necessarily be customers yet. Because it’s not a buyer-seller relationship, you can have more of a discourse about what they do and don’t like about the car as much as the service,” he says.
“You know, it could be an EV fleet in a couple of years time, or it could even be a fuel-cell fleet by 2020, so it’s really exciting for us. It’s like an infant right now, so we’re just going to let it grow and let the customers dictate where it’s going to go and what it’s going to be. I think we just need to keep listening.”
In terms of nuts and bolts, Yuko is pretty simple. You pay a €50 sign-on fee (which is being converted into rental credits for the first few customers), pay a €6 monthly membership fee and then prices start at €8 per hour for a Yaris, with daily rentals from €60. The overnight rate, which runs from 12am to 7am starts at €14 for a Yaris, and you can get a 15-minute extension to your rental for a price of between €2 and €3.75. There’s a standard €1,000 insurance excess but that can be reduced to €200 if you pay an extra €4 on your monthly membership fee.
Disarmingly easy
There are 15 cars positioned in Dublin initially, at three sites across the city and suburbs and they’re all hybrids, all top-spec and all have sat-nav. Using one is disarmingly easy. You simply hold your Yuko membership card over a sensor in the windscreen, the locks pop, you press the ignition button and off you go.
“Really, it started with pay-as- you-go mobile phones, I think that dramatically changed a lot of business models. Motor cars are a high-yield purchase, they’re expensive, so I think more and more, especially millennials who are coming through, I don’t think that they like the idea of the burden of ownership,” says Connolly.
"You can share almost anything these days, and in fact I think Ireland has probably been a little bit behind when you look at the likes of Germany and the USA, where the likes of ZipCar have been streets ahead in terms of car sharing. So really, once the initial discussions started it felt like a bit of a no-brainer. We have lots of new technology coming along, so how do we get people who wouldn't necessarily get put in front of that tech, how do we get them to experience that?
“I think that the Irish consumer and car buyer tends to be rather pragmatic, and maybe is reluctant to change into something new or different, so they can drive hybrid and you can see straight away that initial anxiety, they’re anxious because they may not have driven an automatic before, and they may not have driven a hybrid, but as soon as they get going you can see them thinking that, ‘Hey, this is really, really easy’, and it’s not what they expected and that’s been a joy, that’s been a lot of fun.”
So, partly it’s an extension of Toyota’s marketing machine. Get people to rent these high-tech new hybrids (the current Auris, Yaris and Prius fleet will be augmented with a plugin Prius and a hybrid C-HR crossover next year) and they’ll see what they’re like and hopefully they might go out and buy one.
But there is also a more forward-looking element, a tilt at a future where even steadfast Irish consumers, generally more keen than European counterparts to own rather than rent, can see the possibilities of the on-demand economy. It’s not fanciful to see Yuko one day putting as many people behind the wheel of a Toyota as do traditional dealership sales.
“It’s good for Toyota because there are people who maybe can’t afford to buy a new car who we can put into our products, or lapsed Toyota owners who can be re-introduced to the brand, or we might have people who already own a Toyota who have aunts or uncles or cousins or whatever who might think that it’s the ideal service for them to use, so we can keep people in the Toyota family, but maybe not in an ownership model,” says Connolly. “It’s a wonderful open dialogue with people who are using your products, who mightn’t necessarily be customers yet. Because it’s not a buyer-seller relationship, you can have more of a discourse about what they do and don’t like about the car as much as the service.
Those who have signed up already are apparently hitting some unexpected marks. One member in particular has block-booked a car at 4pm every week day, because she intends to use it to collect here children from school, which suggests that at least one Irish consumer has cottoned on to the potential of the sharing economy. And she could well be the first pebble in a landslide.
"It's all of the above. It's new. We want to learn as much as possible from what we're doing here in Dublin but the ambition would be that we roll it out across Europe. It's here to stay, and a big push from Japan at the moment is the whole 'future of human mobility' so it's a very exciting industry of which to be a part.
“A lot of it’s being driven by the changing needs of customers, so this feels like an extension of the traditional ethos of Toyota. We can sense the demand from customers, certainly in Ireland, you had a lot of two-car families that, through financial necessity, reduced to one car, but yet every so often, there’s that strain where you need a second car. Our ambition would be to see that it’s a self-sustaining model, that it’s not just an extension of the Toyota sales model, that it exists for more than that.”
Micro renting
We’ve seen other car makers, notably
BMW
and
Peugeot
dabble in the micro-renting sphere before, and others, such a
General Motors
, have invested heavily in on-demand share- and-ride schemes such as Lyft. But this is a little different. This is the company which has had more sustained success than anyone else in the world at making and selling cars, saying that it now sees a future where the selling bit has less relevance.
Connolly touts Yuko’s potential to put new car technology in front of potential buyers, such as electric and even hydrogen power, but the very fact that Toyota, a company not known for taking needless risks, is looking at a major shift in the ownership model of cars may have even greater impact than any form of fuel or propulsion.
