Analysis: Industry eyes mobility jackpot

That also goes beyond subscription services – a single payment that covers the hire, insurance and tax for a car – as they currently exist. MAAS really begins with, for example, a subscription service that gives you access to a range of cars at different times.

“People want a more flexible model,” said Lex Kerssemakers, head of the Direct Consumer Business arm at Volvo. This is a stand-alone company created recently with the freedom to act as a start-up and tasked with investigating how MAAS can work in both the medium- and long-term future.

Kerssemakers said the new Care by Volvo subscription service is a “spearhead” that will evolve to include “numerous ownerships or sales models”, and one that requires a structural change. That’s likely to include flexible subscriptions without long-term commitments, allowing customers to swap to different cars for short periods or when their circumstances change.

But even those subscription services are based on the concept that people want to have their own car, and car makers are also looking beyond that. The latest is Toyota’s new Kinto brand, which joins other nascent mobility divisions such as Volkswagen’s Moia and the PSA Group’s Free2Move.

Toyota fleet mobility boss Tom Fux said Kinto will come in “after car subscriptions and flexible owning – when peopleask if they need a car at all.”

That form of mobility is likely to be focused on cities, where private car ownership is increasingly being discouraged or penalised for environmental, safety and space reasons. What nobody is certain yet is how the public will react. Will they all switch to mass transport? Or ride-hailing apps such as Uber? How about shared multi-purpose autonomous shuttles, such as Toyota’s e-Palette concept and the recently revealed Cruise Origin, which is slated for production just two years from now by a start-up owned by General Motors?

Exactly how these shuttles will work and be used is unclear, too. Toyota will test deploying its creation in the host cities of the next three Olympic Games: Tokyo this year, then Beijing in 2022 and Paris in 2024. It will also use them in the 175-acre autonomous vehicle-only experimental city that it plans to build from scratch in Japan.

The Origin is intended to first be used for a San Francisco ride-sharing service before rolling out elsewhere. Only by conducting such real-world tests will firms find out exactly how future customers will use their services and vehicles.

Kinto isn’t the first mobility sub-brand of a car maker, and Luigi Luca, Toyota’s director of mobility, said that’s by design. He said the firm has learned from others and, like them, is taking a long-term approach, comparing this to the huge ahead-of-its time investment in the Toyota Prius hybrid and Toyota Mirai hydrogen fuel cell cars.

“It’s a marathon, not a sprint, to make it successful and profitable,” said Luca. Except, unlike a marathon, nobody actually knows where the finish line is yet – or even what it looks like. In fact, the whole concept of MAAS is still unclear – in particular how it might work in the more limited infrastructure outside of cities.