Car ownership will soon be a thing of the past, some say.

Some wish.

Instead of buying a car every so often and driving that car for a period of years – and owning the car – people will simply tap an app and rent a car by the hour or day; whatever their need at the moment happens to be.

It sounds breezy – and oh-so-easy!

This may indeed be our metrosexualized future  . . . god help us. But not for those reasons. There are always other reasons. The real reasons.

There is money to be made, naturally. Great huge stacks of it. Someone with a calculator and the instinct of a Don King or Colonel Parker did a little math and figured out that it would be orders of magnitude more profitable to rent people cars than sell people cars.

You can only sell a car to one person at a time, after all.

But rent? By the hour?

Theoretically – and probably, actually – you could keep a given car working like a Filipino Lady Boy, almost 24-7. Pimping the ride to one "John" after the next. With carpet vacuuming and Febreze in between.

Almost no down time.

The car that brings in say $400/month as a sale brings in that much – or more – in a week – as a rental. No wonder the stampede toward "transportation as a service." GM especially – which is already implementing this via its Maven app in the New York City area.

It is the equivalent of discovering a new Ghawar oil field under Brooklyn. The price of real estate just went up.

It also gives the manufacturers – the GM corporate – direct access to your wallet (via revolving credit) which must be giving multiple orgasms to the people in GM's accounting department. Dealers will be cut out of the picture – at best, reduced to parking lot attendants and service depots, the business side of that between them and the manufacturers, all costs of course folded into the rental fee charged to you.