Image: Volvo
Just a few years ago, car subscriptions seemed as if they were going to be the next big thing in vehicle purchasing. Every automaker from Porsche to Ford and even car rental agencies were getting in on the game. Now though, most of them have all but quietly vanished.
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Subscriptions came about because of bad assumptions made by automakers. Mid-decade, the assumption was that by now (or at least going into the 2020s) we’d all be transitioning in a driverless car utopia and single-person car ownership would be a thing of the past. People would simply order up an autonomous vehicle from a free-roaming fleet to get to their destinations. Since no one would actually buy cars, people would subscribe to use them, essentially ending car ownership as we currently know it.