What it is: Car sharing and ride sharing services offer an alternative to owning and driving your own car.
When people hear rumors of an Apple Car, they automatically think it means Apple is building a self-driving, electric car that you can purchase. However, such a car would put Apple into immediately competition with Tesla, Nissan, General Motors, Ford, Honda, and every other car manufacturer that also has self-driving, electric car technology. The real way to compete in any market is never to compete in the market that rivals currently dominate because chances are good you’ll never replace the dominant market leader.
The reason why more people aren’t using Windows PCs isn’t because they’re using Linux or Macintosh computers. It’s because they’re using smartphones more and PCs less. The reason why people stopped renting movies from Blockbuster Video wasn’t because they switched to rivals like Hollywood Video, but because they switched to streaming video. You can never knock off the leader in a market by simply copying what the leader does. If you just copy the leader, there’s little reason for anyone to switch from the leader to a new rival.
The way to disrupt market leaders is to upend the market altogether. If Apple tried to sell the Apple Car to compete against Ford, General Motors, or Toyota, they’d get wiped out. What Apple will likely do is compete by not competing. IN other words, the Apple Car is going to be part of the new car sharing and ride sharing world.
The Transportation Sustainability Research Center (TSRC) studied the impact of car sharing service Car2Go and discovered that car sharing reduced the number of vehicles on the road and increased mobility. Car sharing doesn’t require as much parking since a car doesn’t just sit idle all day, but can be used by multiple people throughout the day.
Similar to car sharing is ride sharing, made popular by Uber and Lyft. With ride sharing, someone drives you around so that takes cars off the road and eliminates parking problems at the same time.
Taking cars off the road reduces congestion and pollution while increasing mobility at the same time and lowing the cost of transportation for individuals. Instead of wasting money buying your own car and spending even more money parking it all day long, you can spend far less on a car with a car or ride sharing service. Now you can travel cheaper with less stress and have far more money left over to buy something else that will improve the quality of your life.
Because car and ride sharing offers huge benefits in reducing pollution and traffic congestion, Apple will likely release the Apple Car as a car sharing/ride sharing service and not waste time trying to sell individual cars to people. By not selling cars to people, Apple can avoid the sleazy sales tactics traditional dealerships rely on to get as much money from people while making the car shopping experience so distasteful at the same time.
People don’t want cars as much as they want safe, cheap, convenient transportation. That’s the market the Apple Car is targeting, not the individual car ownership market. The more people use car and ride sharing services, the less they’ll want to buy a car for themselves, and that means declining sales for traditional auto makers but a wide open market for companies such as Apple.
To read more about the benefit of car sharing services, click here.