First things first; what is DriveNow?
Not all my readers live in Germany so here is what DriveNow is about. DriveNow is a car-sharing program introduced by BMW and rolled out in Germany and in San Francisco. In Germany it competes with offerings owned by Mercedes (Car2Go), Volkswagen (Quicar, only in Hannover) and Deutsche Bahn (Flinkster). What's great about these Programs is - apart from Flinkster - that you can find and park the car anywhere in e.g. Berlin in the streets. You're not bound to pick-up and return at fixed stations in the city. Parking is for free, even in zones where parking is normally charged. Astonishing enough the cars are invariably in a clean and scratch-free state. You find and book cars using a mobile app or a website. You open and close the cars with a NFR chip that's attached onto your driver's license.
The business model is very easy. You pay 29 Euro cts. / minute once you've started a booking and are driving the car. If you want to keep it for further use you pay 10 cts. / Minute parking fee.
For a one-off fee of 29 EUR you join the program and the rest of your costs are variable.
So far so good.
I want to pay for how often I HAVE used the service, not on how many times I PLAN to use it!
Then I got an email announcing a new tariffs. When I read it at first I thought it was all ok. They just announced the availability of pre-paid minute bundles. Buying more minutes gets you a lower charge / minute. Then I saw that they increased the tariff per minute from 29 to 34 cts/minute. And then it dawned on my. This pre-paid payment model is totally wrong.
Dear DriveNow, your program is all about utter convenience. The fact that I can pick up and leave a car anywhere I want within the dedicated zone, without being bothered about parking fees or fuel is fantastic. Now don't ask me to plan the usage of your program ahead. I know I will be on the loosing streak when I don't consume the minutes in one month that I thought I'd need.
In fact its no longer in line with how the internet works. I expect to use you're offering on a very simple basis. I want to pay for how often I HAVE used the service, not on how many times I PLAN to use it! For god's sake in today's world I wouldn't know how to plan that and actually I don't want to. Discount based on Use-Frequency is so easy to achieve and above all so fair!
So my suggestion is that DriveNow respects the Keep It Super Simple or K.I.S.S. approach which they applied at the start.
Pay-per-use
So DriveNow should really offer me an automatically increasing discount when I use the program more frequently. I should feel rewarded for using the program. That is e.g. also the case through the "fill up the tank and earn 20 free minutes" deal. That is how I want to use DriveNow. I provide a value by filling up the tank and get a more than generous 20 minutes in return. "I Like"!
This new pre-paid package feels all wrong and reminds me too much of the old subscription economy, so much loved by the telecom operators. They spend tons of money on explaining packages with all sorts of limits and benefits which in the end still come across as a swindle.
Selling services in today's internet economy should not be about selling 'old-school subscriptions but a "pay-per-use frequency" model. DriveNow has the opportunity to apply this in the real world. I would even go as far as accepting an increase of the fee for infrequent use to 50cts/minute. As long as it rapidly declines when I use it more often.
Anyway, thanks for reading my blog. Feel free to share, comment and discuss!
Matthieu
For further reading:
DriveNow website
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