General Motors started its car-sharing service, Maven, just over a year ago. Since then, the service has grown exponentially.

Besides offering hourly and daily rental cars in 17 North American cities, Maven also offers Maven Gig, a service that lets people rent cars to do odd jobs, like ride-hailing for Lyft or delivering food for GrubHub.

Maven now has 7,000 total vehicles in its fleet, including hundreds of all-electric Chevrolet Bolts and big SUVs like the Chevrolet Equinox and Cadillac Escalade. That’s good exposure for GM, which says the typical Maven user is 30 years old. The company is just starting to track whether users are more likely to purchase a GM car after driving them through Maven.

“We’re not running after shiny objects. We’re building a service capability and a platform,” says Julia Steyn, GM’s vice president for Urban Mobility and Maven.

Why is it important for an automaker to offer this kind of service? Why not just build cars and let others rent them?

“It comes from where the customer preferences are. You look at the changing environment and you clearly see a very growing part of the population who wants to interact with cars in a different way, and it’s not ownership. I’m a big believer that the preference for ownership will continue, and it will be determined by what you do, where you live and how you deploy the vehicle. But the growth part of this population... wants the fractional ownership of it,” said Julia Steyn.

“So it’s very important for automakers... to become a service provider and interact with the customer in a different way. And being a service provider is very different. You have different customer habit formation, different marketing, you need to have a platform that you can integrate the offerings and differentiate the offerings. It’s not just the vehicle and an app. It’s the whole ecosystem around this that you have to develop as a service to make sure you’re successful.“

At present, GM “is better off” with Maven, said Julia Steyn. “We’re clearing more than 100 percent return on the investment.”