Local Motion

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= "Stop sharing the keys, start optimizing your assets. For corporations, campuses and government fleets".

URL = https://www.getlocalmotion.com/


Description

MARCUS WOHLSEN:

"“We’ve got the technology to change our patterns of consumption,” he says. “But to what extent will we?”

Maybe the problem is too much democracy. The promise of the sharing economy is typically framed as a bottom-up, grassroots effort. Individuals make independent decisions to share their possessions and their time and together create a groundswell that overturns the dominant paradigm.

Perhaps the more efficient way to move mainstream consumer culture towards more sharing is from the top down.

In other words, the sharing economy works better if your boss makes you.

That’s the premise of Local Motion, which today announced $6 million in funding from venture capital kingpin Andreessen Horowitz. The Silicon Valley-based startup installs a small piece of hardware inside the cars and trucks used by corporations, city governments, and universities. The idea is that — rather than different parts of a large institution operating their own cars, cars that mostly sit idle in parking lots — the organization can open up its whole fleet to the entire staff.

Just look for a car with a green LED, swipe your ID card (the same one you use to unlock the door to your office), and drive off. “The trick is to provide an experience that’s better than the experience of owning your car,” says Local Motion co-founder Clément Gires.

Local Motion’s pitch is that within as little as a week, the data collected on vehicle usage can tell fleet managers how many cars and trucks wind up sitting in the parking lot — in other words, what percentage of the fleet goes unused (Gires says typically 30 percent). Institutions can shed those cars and save money. In the meantime, workers are eased into the idea of vehicles as shared resources.

“We don’t have the cultural hurdle of taking the car from someone’s garage,” Gires says.

As part of its funding news, Local Motion announced that new Andreessen Horowitz hire and former Microsoft Windows chief Steven Sinofsky would be joining its board. Sinofsky says his first job is to help Local Motion scale to larger and larger organizations. As that happens, he and Gires say the definition of “fleet” starts to expand. Corporations begin sharing vehicles among themselves. Then neighborhoods." (http://www.wired.com/business/2013/08/sharing-economy-localmotion/)