US car giant GM will close by the summer its Maven car-sharing service, which launched in 2016 but has been idle during the Covid crisis.
The closure marks the end of the service that had been struggling long before the pandemic forced it to cease operations, as many similar shared services have done.
Last year Maven scaled back and stopped service in nearly half of the 17 North American cities in which it operated.
Maven continued in Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington, DC and in Toronto, Canada.
GM said that Maven's "assets and resources will be transferred to GM's Global Innovation organisation, as well as the larger enterprise”.
The company said that it has no plans to re-enter the car-sharing business.
GM told TechCrunch that it “will take the great insights we’ve gained from Maven and leverage its car-sharing technology to provide new GM fleet services, and explore other new service offerings”.
Maven started as a pilot programme at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and in August 2017 was chosen as the exclusive car-sharing partner for the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Maven also launched Maven Gig, a rental service for people who work in the gig economy such as drivers of Uber, Lyft and Uber Eats.
By 2018 Maven had 190,000 members and also had entered the Australian market where it provided gig-economy rentals before adding personal car-sharing services.
