If the automotive industry truly joined the membership economy, it could reshape not only mobility, but also the built environment, safety outcomes, and how we spend our time, It could potentially even unlock latent value in underutilized assets. What if instead of owning cars, we simply subscribed to mobility? Vehicles would be in service instead of idle in garages or parking lots. Parking infrastructure could be reclaimed for housing or green space. Did you know that today, in the U.S., there are about six parking spaces for every car? Shared fleets could reduce waste, lower raw-material demand, and ease supply chain strain.
Now imagine we aren’t even driving. With full self-driving (FSD) vehicles, the cabin becomes workspace, lounge, or nap zone. Driving’s constraints—sleepiness, distraction, consumption of bandwidth—would be outsourced to robust automation. Now maybe that means we spend more time on our phones, especially since driving is one of the last “everyday” activity that doesn’t allow for scrolling, but I like to imagine a world where we use our found car time for deep work, deep rest, or deep connection.
Executing this future is fiendishly hard. Already, OEMs are setting grand subscription and software ambitions. GM has publicly forecast that its Super Cruise feature could generate $2 billion in annual revenuewithin five years. In its Q2 2025 call, GM stated its Super Cruise and OnStar deferred software revenue bucket totals $4 billion.Meanwhile, Ford’s commercial division, Ford Pro, reported that telematics and fleet-management subscriptions doubled year over year, contributing to a 24% increase in software‐based subscription revenue and pushing toward a target that 20% of EBIT comes from aftermarket software by 2026.
These headlines mask two deeper structural hurdles:
1. Top-down sizing vs bottoms-up value creation. Most forecasts of “$X billions in automotive SaaS” stem from large-market sizing exercises: e.g. “if N % of vehicles adopt and pay Y dollars per year, you get Z revenue.” These projections often lack a granular mapping from specific use cases (e.g. predictive maintenance, dynamic route provisioning, micro-insurance, ride pooling) to willingness to pay, cost to deliver, and product margination. Without that bottoms-up model, strategy risks being untethered from real economics—and unsustainable in deployment.
2. The strangling weight of scale and commercial risk. Even when automakers incubate new ideas or acquire startups, internal inertia, fixed-cost burdens, and legacy channel constraints often suffocate them. A nascent mobility-as-a-service (MaaS?) business might be starved of investment, forced to defend dealership margins, or held back by cautious finance metrics. Acquisitions, once integrated, may be absorbed into the core, losing nimbleness or being judged on cash ROI supplanting longer horizon innovation. In short: corporate scale often eats the goose laying the golden eggs.
So when we list the challenges: customer willingness to pay; defining differentiated value; bridging software, data, and cloud infrastructures; cultural resistance and structural misalignments; dealer conflicts; pricing, churn & retention; regulatory uncertainty; investor impatience—these are just surface symptoms of deeper architectural dilemmas.
It’s entirely possible that breakthrough mobility subscriptions won’t emerge from incumbent OEMs, but from bold outsiders or platform-oriented actors who deliberately remain asset-light and modular.
But if one of them cracks it, the rewards transcend profit models: less waste, more density, safer roads, and precious time liberated from monotony. If you can ride, not own—and your ride thinks, learns, adapts—you’re buying more than mobility. You’re buying possibility.