As the end of June approached, a notice appeared on the website of online vehicle provider Cazoo bearing this message: “We’re no longer offering Cazoo cars for subscription”.
It marked the end of a dream within the disruptive UK-based car retailer to reshape the owning process for customers. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean the idea of flexible car ownership is dead: just that the companies offering it need to work out how to finance long term what is a very capital-intensive business.
Cazoo’s reason for dissolving its subscription arm after spending over £150 million on growing it was due to “the highly cash-consumptive nature of this business model”, the company said, as part of a wider announcement earlier in June that it would curtail investments and cut jobs to save cash.
Companies wanting to make subscriptions work need to get a grip on the finances first, argues Arndt Ellinghorst, former automotive analyst and now a director at data analyst firm QuantCo. “You can’t just say: ‘I do mobility as a service!’ That’s great but who owns the car, where’s the car coming from and how do you make money?” he said. “You have hundreds or thousands of £30,000-£40,000 assets sitting on your balance sheet that need to be refinanced and you need to manage the residual value risk. So it’s not trivial.”
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The flexibility that makes this form of leasing attractive for customers who are unwilling to be tied into long agreements also increases the burden on the subscription provider to ensure that their car is continually earning and isn’t a drag on the rest of their business.
Even Volvo, one of the car companies that has persisted with subscriptions after others bailed, wrote in its 2021 annual report that it was “working with partners to explore external funding solutions” to offer subscriptions “while offloading the financing of the cars from Volvo Cars’ balance sheet”.
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