Upshift Founder Ezra Goldman on Offering Cars as a Service

I had been using carshare a lot but found it was expensive, unpredictable, and unreliable. I didn’t want to buy a car since I mostly wanted to use it to go hiking on the weekends, and it felt like an expensive headache and a waste. About 124 million cars in the US are driven less than 10,000 miles per year — but they still have all the headaches of car payments, insurance, maintenance, parking, etc. 

The initial idea was fractional car ownership for two people to co-own a car. This was too complex. Scheduling, maintenance, cleanliness, etc. all really need a manager with a fleet of vehicles to ensure reliability, consistency, and availability. We decided to deliver cars because co-owners might live far apart and vehicle automation would eventually make it standard.

Car delivery would be complicated logistically, and we needed a platform to iterate on the business model, so we launched with a car rental delivery service. We later pivoted to a fractional car subscription service, and that really enabled us to provide a predictable, personalized service that is a true car leasing alternative for low-mileage drivers.

Since we closed our last Republic campaign 18 months ago, we’ve integrated telematics across our fleet, so members can locate, unlock, and drive our cars via app. This streamlines our delivery operations since our team doesn’t need to meet in person and can deliver cars in the most efficient order. We also relaunched our delivery logistics app and built a new dispatch backend to scale our deliveries. We tripled recurring revenues, doubled the size of our team, and increased our fleet by 50%.

I co-founded the company with my wife, and her grit and entrepreneurial drive has supported us through some of the biggest challenges. In the founding period of the company, we drove for rideshare and cleaned people’s apartments as gig workers to bootstrap. We’ve come a long way since then, and many of our teammates come from relationships cultivated over the years and industry connections. 

We call our leasing model “fractional leasing.” It’s customized to you. You pay only for the days you use the car, and we take away all the other hurdles and headaches for you, like gas, insurance, service, cleaning, and parking. 

If you use a car realistically anywhere between four and 12 days a month, it means the car is not in use at least 18 days every month. So you are paying a ton of money every month to have a car on standby. It’s crazy. So, we’ve created this new car leasing model that works for people and the planet more than it works for traditional car leasing companies.

We’re going to integrate teleoperations across our fleet. This will allow us to deliver the cars remotely from headquarters and to serve less dense areas, like suburbs and smaller cities. Second, we’ll expand our service to a second city. Finally, we want to begin to electrify our fleet.

Aside from initial public offering, the most likely exit strategies we envision would be to a car manufacturer, rental car company, or car dealership conglomerate looking to gain technology, data, and operations capacity. Upshift is the future of the car dealership for when people subscribe to cars as a service, so any legacy automotive stakeholder is a potential acquisition target.