America’s Biggest Carmaker Is Betting On a Future Without Car Ownership

CES is happening this week, where all sorts of companies will trot out all sorts of gizmos. But the biggest tech news to come out so far happened in Detroit, not Las Vegas. America's largest car company made a substantial bet that, sometime in the near future, no one is going to own cars anymore.

General Motors is investing $500 million in ridesharing company and Uber competitor Lyft, with the two express directives behind that money being to kill the very idea of car ownership.

In the near term, GM will help Lyft set up car rental hubs so that people who do not own cars can go drive other people around. In the long term, Uber and GM will develop robo taxis that don't need any driver at all.

This approach to the future of transportation isn't a new idea at all—it's no secret that the future of cars is driverless and automated, and it's no secret that Uber and Lyft believe ridesharing is the future—but a substantial investment coming from one of the Big Three American automakers is as clear a signal as there is that very soon we may not own cars.

GM has obvious incentive to diversify as it'd like to prevent the kind of disaster that led to the whole 2008 bankruptcy/bailout situation. It has rebounded from that snafu quite well—it now has $25 billion on hand, according to recent reports. And so we can't look at the $500 million it has put into Lyft and suggest that GM thinks that car-sharing is where the industry is going right this second. But we can look at the investment as an indication that there's a pretty good chance some sort of fundamental shift is coming in the industry.

GM's long-term play will be to become more of a service provider that also happens to make and design the cars than a direct-to-consumer product manufacturer.

Don't believe me? Here's what Lyft president John Zimmer told The New York Times: "We strongly believe that autonomous vehicle go-to-market strategy is through a network, not through individual car ownership."

GM's president, Daniel Ammann, said much the same thing, noting that people in cities already don't own cars.

"From a GM perspective, we view this as much more of an opportunity than a threat," he said. "We think there's going to be more change in the world of mobility in the next five years than there has been in the last 50."

That's not really all that bold of a prediction to make if you look around at the other players in the industry.

There's been absolutely no indication by Google that it will ever sell autonomous cars to the general public, and with all of Google's advertising, mapping, and personal data capabilities, it probably makes more sense for them to go into the car-as-service-rather-than-product route. Uber is developing driverless cars with a fleet of engineers it poached from Carnegie Mellon University, and one of CEO Travis Kalanick's express goals is to make using an Uber to get around cheaper than actually owning a car.

And so Monday's General Motors news is immensely important. Not because it's surprising, but because it's a logical acknowledgement from an industry giant that, pretty soon, owning a car may become a thing of the past.