Published on the 06/07/2016 | Written by Donovan Jackson

Could ‘everything as a service’ empty your garage? It’s an interesting concept, particularly with the advent of driverless cars and the extension of the ‘service’ model from computing and application resources to the requirement for transport…

It’s also so alluring that the head of Toyota New Zealand recently said soon, people won’t own cars.

Quoted in Stuff, Alistair Davies said, “I foresee a future where there will be MaaS [Mobility as a Service] everywhere. Instead of people buying cars, the vehicles will be shared and the drivers will be billed monthly for car usage and road user charges.”

‘Peak car’ has been predicted and terminal decline of ownership anticipated.

Like many notions, conceptually MaaS makes sense. Cars are expensive and tend to be ‘underused’ (when it is not actually being driven, a car is theoretically not being used – apparently, that’s 95 per cent of the time). There are too many cars about, as a trip to work on an Auckland Monday morning is sure to attest. Technology is making the world smaller and also making it easier to share resources like transport: Uber, Zipcar and DriveNow are some examples.

Another is Auckland and Wellington’s Cityhop, the car sharing service which has been in operation since 2007. Founder Victoria Carter has the necessary experience to observe that this is useful for cities only. “You do need density; this is an urban solution which very much depends on size,” she confirmed.

That realisation has driven Cityhop to almost 40 cars, which to date have been used by around 5000 people.

A drop in the ocean, given that there are around 1.4 million people in Auckland (and just about all of them appear to have cars).

The more impressive statistic, by far, is that 30 of Cityhop’s cars are used by 2000 people who get the benefit of a vehicle without all the costs of owning one directly. Instead, they pay a $120 membership fee and $15 an hour, all inclusive, when actually using a car. The impact that has on congestion is obvious.

People in cluttered cities, continued Carter, tend to start thinking about how often (or not) they use their cars. When it is easier to bus, walk or bike, having just one vehicle per family starts looking like a much better idea than two. A shared car can become part of a range of other mobility options. Millennials, too, tend to have a far more favourable view of ‘sharing’ growing up as they are in what some have called the ‘sharing economy’.

For businesses, there is a case to be made for MaaS through car share or other means. Being able to move people without needing a fleet has cost benefits (remember that 95 per cent idle stat?) There is a big efficiency play; what’s more, pointed out Carter, car sharing causes a reduction in the amount of driving people do. “Individuals go from driving 8 000km a year, to just 800km. That’s because they are paying for the drive more directly, so there is a big increase in choosing alternative means of transport rather than simply defaulting to the car.”

So MaaS makes good sense on the one hand.

On the other, people don’t necessarily buy cars for their utility alone, something marketers have long capitalised upon and to which an endless succession of utterly impractical vehicles readily attests.

There is also considerable variance in how people use cars; it isn’t just a matter of grabbing a ride between here and there. For example, to those with small children, boats, caravans, horses, bicycles, trailers and other more specialised needs, owning a specific type of vehicle becomes important.

The problem too, if it is that, for New Zealand is that there are exactly two cities right now for which MaaS makes sense. Those two cities are serviced by Cityhop, where a very small percentage of residents have bought into the apparent benefits.

Carter believes the next steps for MaaS, with a particular view to reducing congestion and pollution, involve strong leadership from those in positions of authority, perhaps confirming that market forces are insufficient to drive people from their vehicles. “In Amsterdam, for example, the government is making it extremely difficult to own a car in the next 5 years as part of its ‘green deal’. You’d have to be exceptionally rich to own one,” she said.

So, even as driverless technology advances, and the availability of more services like Cityhop and international counterparts like Zipcar and DriveNow continue to gather pace (by 2020, said Carter, around 25 million people are expected to share 440,000 cars worldwide – an increase of 400 percent from today’s numbers), it is likely that ‘ownership will disappear’ is a step too far. Instead, mixed models of mobility are likely to persist for some time.

Including the potentially increasingly old-fashioned notion of private car ownership.