Buying or leasing a car stinks. It’s confusing and cumbersome. You have to show up to a dealer in person and fill out a ton of inscrutable paperwork while a salesman tries to upsell you on maintenance packages; you have to pay a lot of money upfront and commit for the long haul. And that’s before you tack on maintenance, dealing with a third-party insurance provider and keeping your vehicle registration up to date.
The natural question in our digital age: what if there was just an app for that? And it’s a question that some auto manufacturers, rental car companies and startups have tried to answer — with varying degrees of success and commitment. (We encountered multiple dead websites while researching this post.
Why You Should Consider a Car Subscription Service
Car subscription services offer two primary benefits to customers: ease and flexibility. The process is streamlined; you subscribe to your vehicle by phone with a few button taps, while someone else handles all the nitty-gritty details and insurance. Many of the services will deliver the car to your house.
Subscriptions also offer some degree of flexibility, compared to a traditional car lease. The term will be much less than 36 months. And you may be able to swap within a fleet of vehicles: an electric Taycan for the daily commute, a Cayman for the weekend and a Cayenne for that family road trip you have coming up.
Why Car Subscriptions Aren’t Quite Working Yet
Why doesn’t everyone convert to car subscription services? In most places, they don’t have the option. Few services have mastered a fundamental scalability challenge. Flexibility may be a primary appeal for buyers. But the more options to swap cars you add the harder it gets to expand the service beyond a small network of dealers in an individual city.
Another critical problem is cost. Current car subscription services are much more expensive than leasing an equivalent car, and the ease and flexibility may not be worth the additional premium.
Adoption has been sporadic and slow-going, and many car companies have given up on it. Brands like Cadillac and BMW have suspended/terminated their programs after trials in individual cities.
