End of Australian q-delivery

End of Australian q-delivery, Zeus acquires Zipp and Ford offers hands-off in the UK

Ride-Hailing & Taxi, Buses & DRT 🚙🚐

SWVL is struggling. The company received its 3rd delisting warning from Nasdaq and must raise its share value to over $15M by September 25th; current market cap is circa $5.7M, so some way to go. The past few weeks also saw key personnel leaving the company - two board members and strong-man CFO Youssef Salem. There have been suggestions of potential acquisitions (of SWVL) or partnership from ‘strategic investors’, which I’m guessing will be public in the near future.

The story of Bolt in an 8:41 min video - how a 19 year old named Markus Villig set up a successful ride-hailing company worth today $8.4bn. Watch the story of Bolt’s unique ‘underdog’ strategy.

Viggo, Danish ‘green’ ride-hailing, raised €3.27M. Funds will be used for international expansion and development of ViggoEnergy, its charging stations solution.

Blablacar is looking to expand in India. The company has been operating in India since 2015 and has 4 million people using its service, but closed its local office in 2017. Now it is ready to open a local office and grow the market.

In Delhi, rickshaw ride-hailing will now be subject to GST (VAT), court ruled, making the Uber and Ola service more expensive. Jatri, Bangladesh public transport ticketing and car-share platform, raised an undisclosed series A that brings total funding to $5.25M. Grab apologises to Vietnam after its maps showed some of the country’s islands as China’s.

Last week’s Uber PR stunt (Uber’s CEO went undercover as a driver and realised that driver experience isn’t good enough and now Uber is working on improving it) was meant to bring back drivers and to signal to the market that moving forward, recruiting drivers would not require large cash bonuses.

In December 2022, there were 5,612 US school buses 'committed’ (awarded, ordered, delivered or in operation) to electric. Out of roughly 480,000. That’s 1.1%. School buses should be a perfect use case: they are not in use in the summer when electricity demand is high, usually don’t have long routes and have time to charge in between pickup and dropoff if needed. For now, most districts order only a few EV buses, to test operations. Now the federal government has stepped in, with a $5bn budget through 2026. Read the full Bloomberg story.

Sharing/renting 🚗🛴

Turo is blocking access to third party services such as CarSync and Fleetwire (both fleet management tools) starting April 30th. Many ‘hosts’ (car owners on the platform) use those tools to manage their vehicles on the platform, so there is a bit of anxiety in the air. Turo has yet to offer an alternative but has mentioned new relevant features to come in the next weeks and months.

A bill in the making in the US wants to keep the definition of P2P rentals to five vehicles or less. People who manage over 5 vehicles on the platform (and there are plenty of those people) will be reclassified as ‘car rentals’, meaning adhering to relevant regulation and taxation schemes, which is non-existent for P2P rentals. To be continued.

BCG and FINN study on car subscriptions. Subscription services had their fair share of failures over the past years, but the move from ownership to ‘usership’ combined with the shift toward an agency sales model could mean good news for the business. BCG forecasts that consolidation is inevitable and that only a few independent (non-OEM) car share providers will survive - but those will win big. Read the rules for subscription success - too long to summarise here but worth a read for people in the industry.

Cargoroo, shared electric cargo bikes, is crowdfunding. The Dutch company wants to expand to Germany and Belgium. See the campaign here.

Micromobility 🚲🛴

Zeus Scooters acquired Zipp Mobility, as the two Irish companies combine forces to become the #1 player in the country. Back in August Zeus acquired UK-based Zwings. With this latest acquisition, Zeus is present in 50 cities across 9 countries in Europe and Malaysia.

Still in Ireland, Moby, e-bikes as a service for personal or business use, raised €4M. The company works with delivery, logistic and corporate bike fleets in Ireland, the US, UK and Netherlands, and money will be used for Central European expansion.

Skarper raised £4M, bringing total funding to £8M. The company transforms regular bikes into high performing e-bikes using a detachable engine. Funds will be used to set up mass production capabilities and grow the team.

Spin study in Pittsburgh shows that scooters are most used by students and young people, with 50% of users in the ages of 18-24. Scooters are most used for commuting (48%) followed by meeting family & friends (45%), dining out/shopping (23%) and running errands (19%). These results are pretty much inline with other scooter studies.

Neuron launches Canada’s largest micro-mobility scheme in the Waterloo region. 1,000 scooters and bikes will be rolled-out across three cities in the region. Minneapolis selects Lime, Spin and Veo for shared mobility. Tier and Whoosh partner, connecting train services to Tier’s solution by scanning QR codes on trains and in stations. E-cargo bikes is a booming industry, both in the shared mobility (personal) space and the delivery (business) space. Aitour, Dutch e-cargo bike manufacturer, enters the UK market

Delivery 🍽🧺

Milkrun, Australian grocery q-delivery, shuts down, after 18 months in operations and $86M raised. A month and a half ago the company cut 20% of staff and assured that it had runway for another year. Founder/CEO wrote: “economic and capital market conditions have continued to deteriorate, and while the business has continued to perform well… winding down the business while we still have a sufficient cash balance enables us to ensure our people and suppliers are paid in full”. Milkrun was the last of the Australian q-delivery players after Send shut down in May 2022, Voly in November that year and Colab last week’. To the demise of the Australian q-industry we can also add Deliveroo, who left the market back in November 2022 after suffering huge losses.

Uber will fund an e-bike buy-back program for delivery workers to help combat battery fires and will support drivers with an additional fee on food deliveries to help workers afford safer options. The program is run together with e-bike manufacturer Zoomo and a local non-profit.

Whizz, e-bike subscription platform for last-mile delivery drivers, raises $3.4M, bringing total to $4.5M. Funds will be used to improve product and expand presence in NYC.

In Brazil, Rappi acquires Box Delivery.

Autonomous 🤖

Final decision on Navya this week. The company has two offers and a decision should be made tomorrow, Tuesday the 18th.

Waymo and Aurora seeked exemption from rules on warning devices for large semi-trucks but are facing opposition from a US transport union. The question is centred on whether a safety driver needs to be onboard the vehicle. TBC.

May Mobility and Moovit (both Intel backed/owned companies) partner to ‘deploy a complete autonomous mobility package’. In plain english - creating a bundled offer of their products,

Fog in San Francisco caused five Waymo vehicles to stop, causing minor traffic. A Waymo regulatory report included this sentence: “we are currently exploring additional partnership opportunities for meal delivery, among other efforts". Interesting. Autonomous construction vehicles are not coming anytime soon. For now, the construction industry is focused on heavy trucks on fixed routes and teleoperation.

Flying cars 🚁

An interview with Blade CEO, Rob Wiesenthal. A private helicopter and jet company, Rob speaks about medical activities (organ transport) which account for the company’s #1 revenue source and about eVTOLs, noise, and beating Uber Black on price.

Vertaxi, China, completes eVTOL prototype. The company plans to enter the market first with an uncrewed cargo version.

OEMs 🛺⚡️

Ford is offering a hands-off (level 2+ ADAS) system/feature to UK customers. The feature is available on 2,300km of highways, and is offered as a subscription service costing £17.99 per month. Keep in mind - hands off, eyes on. This is not autonomous yet.

Arrival conducts reverse stock split to meet listing rules, effective Friday 14th. The company stock fell about 8% to $0.13 on trading before Friday; post-stock split, the stock is valued at ±$4.2.

Gig economy 💰

Washington State (not to be confused with the city) passed a bill that grants ride-hail drivers the right to paid family and medical leave. The program is to enter into effect July 2024, and is supported by both Uber and Lyft.

In other news 📰

A study finds that “termination of local buses led to substantial increases in poverty and unemployment”. In Clayton County, Georgia, US, a local bus was terminated between 2010-2015 and then restored. This allowed researchers Fei Li and Christopher Wyczalkowski to test the spatial mismatch hypothesis, which predicts that the reduction in transit access can lead to reductions in job accessibility and employment. Researchers also suggest that “the termination of local buses had a greater impact on the poverty rate than on the unemployment rate, indicating that the economic impact of transit disruptions could go beyond those workers who lose their jobs – for example, to their dependents or those who have to work fewer hours or accept lower pay due to longer commute or reduced employment options.”

I’ve been following research on the spatial mismatch hypothesis for some time now, and feel it should be more present in public transportation debates.