See all Motoring AdviceThe idea of a car subscription is a tempting one. Instead of buying a car outright or financing it and then having to trade it in after three years, you simply take out a subscription. No money down, just pay a single monthly fee. A subscription would also cover, in theory anyway, all of your motoring costs aside from fuel — so one monthly payment to cover tax, insurance, servicing, parts, oil, tyres and so on.
In theory, you could also chop and change when you like — taking advantage of car makers’ vast model lineups and subscribe so that you can drive an affordable-to-fuel economy car during the week, but nab a fast and comfortable executive saloon for longer journeys, or maybe even a sports car for the weekend, an SUV for holidays and a van for moving house.
It’s an idea that has been explored in the past, and in fact it has been offered in Ireland at least once. Way back in 2017, when the Volvo XC40 was first launched, Volvo was all geared up to offer subscription-based motoring.
In Ireland, for the XC40, the plan was that customers could pay a €699 monthly fee which covered everything, and after 24 months you could either hand back the car — done and dusted — or choose a new vehicle to subscribe to.
At the time, the plan was that the subscription was not merely about getting hold of a car and paying for it; Volvo planned to introduce an entire eco-system including a range of concierge services such as servicing and pick up, fuelling, cleaning and e-commerce delivery to the car — essentially allowing delivery companies such as Amazon and UPS to remotely open the boot and deliver a parcel to you.
However, it all came to naught. Look on the Volvo Ireland website today and you’ll find only options for outright purchase, and PCP or HP finance. The subscription sank without trace, killed off apparently by insurance costs which were simply too high.
Could a revived subscription service work here, though? It’s possible, but there are some obstacles to negotiate for anyone thinking of introducing a subscription. For a start, in general, Irish consumers prefer to own rather than rent and even if PCP finance is closer to renting than owning, it at least gives the appearance of owning.
Then there is, inevitably, insurance — Irish insurance costs and red tape sank subscriptions before and could easily do so again. There’s also the question of whether subscriptions actually offer the best all-round value for money. Yes, it’s convenient to have all your motoring paid for in one single sum every month, but there’s a strong likelihood that by shopping around for insurance and even for servicing, you could save yourself money compared to what a subscription would cost.
However, there’s a potential saviour for subscription services, and that’s electric cars. Right now, we’re in the earliest possible days of the electric car. After all, it’s only 12 years since the original Nissan Leaf went on sale, and if you think back to 12 years after the original Ford Model T went on sale, and think about how fast cars evolved and developed in that period, well… Electric car evolution is going to out-strip that by far.
So, it makes sense to subscribe to an electric car, protecting yourself from depreciation and any difficulty in selling on or trading in an EV.
Dublin-based DCEV is currently providing electric cars on a subscription basis, and that company’s head, Adrian Slattery, told us that: “It’s basically Netflix — but the reason it’s falling into place now for electric cars is because the depreciation on electric cars is so steep. So up till now, PCP finance purchasing has been the best way to get an EV, because you know you have a bottom line. Hire Purchase is much riskier, but with our subscription, you could have a Kia EV6 one month and then you could have an MG 4 the next, depending on what suits you best”
So, subscription-based services do exist in Ireland, and do seem to work, too. The question now is whether the subscription model spreads out across the rest of the car industry.