Looking at life after car ownership

Car makers continue to branch out into mobility services, but is the demand there?

- NICK GIBBS

Fail fast, fail often’ is a start-up buzz phrase that could have been invented to describe car makers’ ventures into the world of mobility.

Car sharing, car clubs, micromobility, ride-hailing buses, subscriptions: all have been tried by brands over the past few years and, with a few exceptions, most have been a financial failure.

However, the same startup ethos dictates that you learn and move on, so the car industry has taken a different approach. Now all the different elements that fall under the umbrella term ‘mobility’ are being grouped together to offer a co-ordinated range of services that could reflect the changing way we use our cars.

Seemingly disparate elements such as car-sharing, EV charging subscriptions, used car subscriptions, ridehailing and leasing are coming together under one brand overseen by a single executive.

Prominent examples to emerge over the past year or so include Renault’s Mobilize, Toyota’s Kinto and Stellantis’s Free2Move.

For example, Kinto – named after a Japanese cartoon cloud – includes Kinto One (leasing operations), Kinto Flex (car subscriptions), Kinto Ride (ridehailing), Kinto Join (corporate carpooling) and Kinto Go (multimode transport).

Not all elements run in all markets, but Toyota launched Kinto Go in Derby as a pilot of its mobility-as-a-service (MAAS) phone app that can be used to link together and pay for connecting journeys on different forms of transport, one of which in the future might be a Toyota-run and developed ride-share or car-share vehicle.

Kinto One also has a UK presence after Toyota rebranded its leasing functions and bought out the UK leasing arm of Inchcape in 2019.