BMW’s Financial Services USA will launch a new product this month — called Car & Ride Sharing Lease — aimed at accommodating the rideshare and carshare landscape, the company announced yesterday.
Car & Ride Sharing Lease will be available to customers in Washington, California, and Oregon, and will explicitly allow customers to rent out his or her car when not using it, or to use the vehicle for ridesharing services.
Specific details of the program have not yet been made available. BMW Financial did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
Most leases do not permit customers to use their car for carsharing or ridesharing services, but BMW aims to adjust to this continuously growing cottage industry. Companies like Turo, Getaround, Uber, and Lyft all specialize in either peer-to-peer carsharing or ridesharing, while OEMs themselves have established their own on-demand services such as Ford Motor Co.-owned Chariot, General Motors-owned Maven, Daimler-owned Car2Go, and BMW’s own ReachNow.
ReachNow already serves more than 75,000 members in Seattle, Portland, and Brooklyn, according to BMW’s blog. Through the ReachNow app, members have on-demand access to more than 1,300 BMW and MINI vehicles, including the all-electric BMW i3, right in their neighborhood. Members can use any car in the fleet without needing to visit a rental counter or return to a specific location.
“We are very excited to provide an industry-leading, customer-centric approach to mobility services that will allow our customers the ultimate in flexible utilization over the life of their contract with BMW Group Financial Services,” Ian Smith, chief executive of BMW Financial Services Group, Region Americas, said in the press release. “As a company, we are committed to delivering a simple and transparent solution that optimizes our already premium customer experience.”
For more content like this, attend the third annual Auto Finance Innovation event, slated for March 7-8, at the Parc 55 in San Francisco. For information, or to register, visit autofinanceinnovation.com.
