Jon Alain Guzik on maintaining and expanding Borrow's fleet
Borrow, an electric vehicle subscription service, maintains a large fleet of cars, offering consumers a wide away of options.
Jon Alain Guzik on Borrow’s Fleet of EVs
So Jon, Borrow is an electric vehicle subscription service, one of the first of its kind — especially in California. But could you tell us a bit about Borrow’s fleet? What models do you provide and how does it work?
Totally! So we launched in 2017 with one car that we got in the hands of one customer. That one car was a Fiat 500e. We thought that was the best car for the customer because it was small, jaunty, the range was good enough to drive around the city. That was almost four years ago. Since then we’ve bought and sold a ton of cars to our fleet, and we’ve had everything from Smart electric cars all the way up to the Tesla Model S. We’ve had Nissan Leafs, Kia Soul EVs, Hyundai Ioniqs, BMW i3s. We’ve basically had almost every single EV on the market.
So, how do you pick cars?
We want to give our customers choice. That Fiat 500e, while it was an awesome car, wasn’t really for everyone. So, we’re like “how do we give cars to people that want four doors and longer range?” So that’s why we have the Kia Soul EV or the Honda Ioniq. We’re also going to start doing the Chevy Volt soon for people who want a CUV kind of package. We’ve also asked questions like: “How do we do something a little more luxurious or have a little more brand appeal?” That’s why we picked the BMW i3.
So for us, we’re finding these cars, putting them into our fleet, and telling our customers “here’s an EV for everyone, from something really inexpensive like the Smart to something super expensive like the Model S.” And we’re always adding to the fleet. We always have customers ask: “well what if I want this car?” So, we say “Ok, that sounds like a good car for us. We’ll do a bunch of research then we’ll add to the fleet.”
So it seems like there’s a lot of variety you’re offering here. What about in terms of variety of the length of the deal or the subscription? What do you guys offer there?
So it’s funny. People say “can I borrow this car for a weekend or a week?” That’s not our business. From an operations perspective, it’s really hard to run that kind of business. We’re not a rental car company. We’re a subscription company, which means something very specific. We’re offering flexible ownership terms. It starts at 3 months and you have a 6 month term. And those are all renewable. You can’t swap the car halfway through the term, you can’t switch something from here to there. That’s not what people want. Life goes by very quickly. Where I’m gonna be next week I know, but in 6 months it might be something completely different. We give people the flexibility of having the vehicle for as long as they want. With EVs, since things are changing so much, it’s a really good thing to have.
When we’re doing Smart cars, sometimes we’ll run specials as low as $99 per month. And then if you want a Tesla, sometimes it can be as expensive as $2000 per month. So we feel like offering that price point for everything in between is perfect. And it’s why the main reason why our fleet is still expanding.
So about that expansion, where does the fleet go from here?
There’s a lot we’re going to be doing in the future. All of our vehicles are pre-owned, so as we start seeing more of these vehicles come out of their post lease life cycle, we’re acquiring them. They’re sometimes 2, maybe 3 years old, but their battery packs are running great. And it’s a way for us to add more cars to the fleet in a really judicious manner while keeping our prices low at a price people can afford. Like would I like to do the new GM Hummer that’ll be like $150,000? Sure, but I can’t make that work for our customers. So, while a lot of EV ownership is super aspirational, we’re making the aspirational ownership practical.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
By: Tom Hindle
Borrow is an electric vehicle subscription company with one goal: to make driving an EV as simple and accessible as possible. Borrow is the only electric vehicle subscription service of its kind with a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and decarbonizing the everyday drive.