Alexander Miller

Case Study - Switch

Switch is an exciting new start-up car club based across Europe

The objective

Aiming to solve the  main pain points that customers were experiencing with using car clubs in Europe. Primarily -

● Finding an available parking spot in busy locations 

● Finding an available car near to a specific location

The benefit of being able to drop off the car in any location was both a plus and pain point. It posed the challenge of paying for car usage whilst trying to find a park space, finding a car near to where it was needed and no guarantee there would be a car in the desired location.

Working as a self-organised team, we came up with a series of hypotheses to potentially solve the problems identified.

Ridesharing - treating the car as an organised taxi with a driver who would pick up people en route and drive to a designated location (similar to BlaBlaCar). This route of thinking would be more suited to millennials who would be used to this type of service (e.g. Uber) and trust in the tracking and validation of drivers. The cons were that safety would be an issue with matching strangers to drive together and people might prefer to drive themselves. 

Connecting - match those who wished to pick up a car with those who wanted to drop off cars via an app (e.g. locating who was in the area at that particular time)

Aggregated - matching of all rental cars coming into a location. The upside to this idea would be that instead of users having to sign up to multiple car-sharing services this would collate them all in one app and it would give exposure to the smaller players in the industry. However, there was a concern that the larger car-sharing companies wouldn’t want to open up their data to the app.

Prototype

Methods used

The proposed solution

The key question we wanted to answer was;

‘how does this change the lives of users?’

Matching drivers who were dropping off a vehicle to drivers wishing to pick up a vehicle saved huge amounts of time parking the cars - something that could be measured going forward. We recommended that Switch moved forward to match divers to allow a timed swap over of the car.