Daily Exasperation #11

Was traveling yesterday. Starting up again today.

I’m in Seattle for the week (hi Julie Timm, Franz Loewenherz, Anna Zivarts!) and I noticed a new shared mobility option: car-share by the minute called GIG. I don’t think this a totally new concept, but it’s one I don’t often see in New York and I haven’t obviously seen it in other places I’ve traveled in the US. I did see it in London. The specific use case: my traveling buddies and I needed to move heavy luggage from their flat to the Crystal Palace Overground station relatively quickly. A rideshare was too expensive, walking or biking wouldn’t have worked and a full-day or even an hour-long car rental made no sense—too expensive. This option was the type of car-mobility solution that had a perfect use case.

A question is: can it scale? You’ve got to think that this can’t be profitable—so what’s the incentive? I asked the same thing abo…