(Photo by Brian Kersey for Maven, courtesy of General Motors)

There’s a new car-sharing service in town: General Motors’ Maven. To be honest, though, it sounds a whole lot like the other roundtrip car-sharing services available locally—except with fewer cars and parking spots. The company rolled the program out yesterday with just 40 vehicles at 10 sites.

Zipcar, for example, has a fleet of more than 1,000 cars, and just added one-way trips around the region to boot. So is there any reason to give Maven a go?

According to Scott Hall, the general manager for Maven in D.C., one of the ways the new service is differentiating itself is “top-level trims” on all their cars, from the Chevy Volt all the way up to the Cadillac Escalade. “You’re not going to get a car with a light cloth interior that has 40,000 miles on it,” Hall assures us. Their website also touts the “latest and coolest technologies,” including Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, SiriusXM radio, 4G LTE wireless, all available with their cars. And if customers have trouble on the road, they can push the blue button for OnStar service immediately.

Hall adds that you won’t be paying any more for the experience than their local competitors. Prices for Maven start at $8 an hour for compact cars, like the Spark, to $14 for premium cars like the Cadillac ATS and standard SUVs like the GMC Yukon, up to $24 for the Escalade. Zipcar’s rates start at $8 an hour, while Enterprise’s start at $5.

Wired has speculated that the roll-out of Maven—which started in Ann Arbor and has since also expanded to Boston and Chicago—is actually just the foundation for the driverless future that GM plans to build. Nearly 40 percent of D.C. households don’t have a car, according to the 2011 American Community Survey (and their options for getting around without a personal vehicle keep growing with pool ride-sharing and car2go to Arlington popping up in recent months).

For the time being, GM is waiving the membership fee, so there’s no reason for the vehicle-less among us not to have another carsharing option in our pockets (Maven is all done through an app, so there’s no card or wait to get signed up). But to use one of the cars, you’ll have to get to one of those 10 sites—nine of which are in the all-too-predictable areas of Northwest (the other is in NoMa).

“Keeping them fairly close together ensures that members are able to find vehicles that are close to them,” Hall explains. The company is looking at options to expand, but he was unable to give additional details about what that might look like.