Ride-Hailing & Taxi, Buses & DRT 🚙🚐
Grab lays off 1,000 employees, 11% of its workforce. According to Grab, this is a strategic alignment, not “a shortcut to profitability”, as Grab should hit its target for group adjusted EBITDA breakeven this year even without the layoffs. Uber lays off 200 employees in the recruitment division - 35% of the global team.
InDrive receives license to operate in Malaysia. Operating in the country since October 2021, back in September 2022 the company was raided by the authorities for operating without a licence, probably for failing to display the driver’s E-hailing Vehicle Permit (eVP) or allowing passengers to identify their drivers. Now it has regained its licence.
Ruqi Mobility, the ride-hailing arm of Chinese state-owned automaker GAC, raised $117.2 series B. GAC contributed a third of the funding, increasing its stake in Ruqi to almost 20%. Funds will be used to accelerate the commercialisation of robotaxis.
Isle of Man DRT has a fixed timetable on peak times. A detailed Roger French report. Transdev launches microtransit (/DRT) service in San Mateo County, California. The microtransit service integrates and complements current fixed line solutions. New Ulm city council (Minnesota, USA) approved ride-hailing. It might have helped that the last taxi company in the 15,000 residents city has recently closed.
Flix releases its first ESG report. Flix aims for carbon neutral travel in Europe by 2040; introducing the first hydrogen powered coach in 2024 and a bio-LNG fleet in 2023. Electric buses aren’t fit for intercity travel, so the company is investing in other alternative fuels, which are still not advanced enough for wide-scale commercial coach operation.
Veezu acquires Merseyside-based Britannia Taxi. Veezu, founded in 2013 and growing through acquisitions, now has more than 12,500 drivers on its platform. ComfortDelGro Singapore starts charging ride-hailing & taxi riders a platform fee. Gojek in a statement revised its fee structure, taking off platform fee and moving costs to per-ride basis. Gett partners with Collective Benefits to offer loyal taxi drivers access to a reward program. Uber Green debuts in Italy, with a 50 car fleet in Milan. Tata Motors Finance extends support for BluSmart to expand its EV fleet by 200 vehicles. Also Blusmart placed an order with MG for 500 vehicles. SWVL regains compliance with Nasdaq’s audit committee requirements.
WeMove is the new branding for WeDRT and WeCommute - take a look at the new website. WeMove is one of the leading DRT operators in the UK, working with Via, Padam and others on the operational aspect of DRT.
InDrive hires Mark Loughran as Group President, reporting to CEO. Bolt has a new country manager in Tanzania.
Sharing/renting 🚗🛴
Traficar operates in 27 cities across Poland with 3,000 vehicles. Read an interview with the Director of Operations on fleet management, user preferences and electric cars. The Polish car sharing market has seen consolidation over the past years, from 18 companies in 2019 to 2 today.
Splend secures funding to double the number of electric vehicles in its fleet to 1,000 by the end of this year. Karshare, P2P in the UK, has shut down.
Micromobility 🚲🛴
Fluctuo’s European Shared Mobility Index report: dockless bike trips grow in Q1/23 by 33% YoY; docked bikes grow by 12%; scooters (11%), mopeds (-5%) and cars (6%). There are now 750,000 shared vehicles in Europe – 255,000 bikes, 400,000 scooters, 28,000 mopeds and 67,500 cars.
Bolt introduces a new scooter - the model 6. First to be introduced in Lisbon, Riga and Tallinn.
Voi replaces Tier in Vienna, joining Bird, Lime and Link. Bird expands in NYC. Nextbike (by Tier) announces first operations in France, starting in Strasbourg in Spring of 2023 with 600 bikes.
Italy may crack down on use of e-scooters. A proposed legal change could lead to mandatory licence plate registration and rider insurance coverage.
Delivery 🍽🧺
Getir has announced that it plans to exit France. Earlier this month Flink announced it is leaving the country due to heavier ‘dark store’ regulation, with GoPuff already leaving in January. With Getir leaving - currently filing for bankruptcy in the country and waiting to see if there is a buyer - this would be the end of quick commerce in France. This wouldn’t be the first country to see the end of quick delivery - back in April I reported the end of quick commerce in Australia.
Bolt partners with Starship Technologies, autonomous delivery vehicles, for food and grocery deliveries. Pilot will begin in Tallinn in the coming months. Starship already has similar schemes in the US with Grubhub and in the UK with the Co-op.
Foodstuff, a UK Indie food delivery service, is leaving Manchester. The company continues to operate in Bristol and Cambridge.
Autonomous 🤖
Cruise launched an Android app.
People want safety, not autonomous. Ross Gerber, Tesla shareholder and advocate, invited critic Dan O’Dowd for a Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta software ride. That could have gone better. Video. A hacker found a Tesla secret ‘hands-free’ mode. Since Jan. 1, the San Francisco Fire Department has logged at least 39 robotaxi incident reports.
May Mobility autonomous vehicle transit pilot in rural Minnesota to expand with $9.3M federal grant. Baidu obtains licence for robotaxis in Shenzhen.
Flying cars 🚁
Volocopter hopes to be ready for the Paris Olympics, announcing a number of commercial routes that will begin then. First eVTOL flight in Neom, Saudi Arabia, by Volocopter. .
Lilium signs two agreements with Chinese entities that will support its sales and development in the Asia-Pacific region. One with helicopter operator Heli-Eastern including a 100 aircraft order and the other with the Bao’an District of China’s Shenzhen municipality to establish a regional headquarters that will represent Lilium in China and the Asia-Pacific region. Lilium and UrbanV to collaborate on vertiports in Italy and France.
Eve and Blade to expand partnership to Europe. Blade will prepare European commercial routes for Eve, for flights that are set to begin in 2026.
OEMs 🛺⚡️
Rivian acquired the company behind ABetterRouteplanner (ABRP), a popular route-planning app used by EV drivers. ABRP will remain a stand-alone product. Tesla acquires a wireless charging startup.
Rivian to adopt Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS). Hyundai is considering joining Tesla’s NACS alliance.
Tesla’s Semi Trucks are experiencing production difficulties. Ark is a new micro-car made in the UK? The “Electrek” writer is sceptical.
Gig economy 💰
Nigeria’s ‘gig-economy’ workers union threatens indefinite strike. Union is asking for a 200% pay increase to compensate for a 300% fuel cost increase, with app-companies offering 40% only. TBC.
In other news 📰
Yandex is fined by Russian court for failing to turn over user data to the FSB (once named the KGB). The company claims that Western sanctions prevented it from buying and installing the equipment required for the data sharing. Yandex parent company is based in the Netherlands, and Yandex is ‘diversifying’ parts of its business divisions to Europe, so I wouldn’t rule GDPR considerations on the side of Yandex.
VW exec: touch controls ‘did a lot of damage'.
Spain plans to ban short-haul domestic flights, following France’s lead. Spain going back on cycle paths.
EV sales by country 2010-2022 infographics.
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