Ride-Hailing & Taxi, Buses & DRT 🚙🚐
SIXT invests “significant million euro sum” in Blacklane’s €33.9M Series F round. As part of the deal, Blacklane services will integrate into the SIXT app and will see further cooperation with SIXT’s fleet capabilities & connected services offering. With this investment & partnership, Blacklane eyes US expansion.
Has CleverShuttle quietly shut down? Five months ago CleverShuttle announced that DB decided not to continue financing the company, and that the company is looking for new investments / acquisitions. While no official word from CleverShuttle itself, Via started posting its “dismay” over the company’s ceased operations, bravely suggesting their services, and many people in the company are now posting “open for work” on LinkedIn.
Uber is playing nice with tax - articles by The Verge and TechCrunch. The trigger for these articles is the recent Uber partnership with Los Angeles Yellow Cab. Taxis are featured in the Uber app in 33 countries around the world, with taxi drivers “on track to make well over $1 billion in earnings this year” per Uber. Three months ago I wrote about why this is happening in a special #movingpeople deep-dive. My take is that the new taxi partnerships are due to driver shortages and tightening gig-worker regulation. To these adds another reason: reduced gig-drivers insurance and liability costs.
Gojek launches GoRide Transit - a multimodal travel connecting public transport trains to the platform. Customers can use Gojek to book the train and the connecting ride-hailing solutions to/from the train station.
Nemi, a Spanish-based DRT player, launches in Vilafranca del Penede (Spain). Interestingly, the service runs differently on weekdays / weekends & holidays, with on-demand available only on weekdays. Video.
InDrive expands operations in Pakistan. InDrive is battling regulation in Botswana. The same old story: taxi drivers pay licence fees to the government -> ride-hailing doesn’t -> taxi association complains -> government looks into existing regulations.
Trenton launches electric-car microtransit system with Circuit. Padam autonomous + ‘regular’ DRT in Sweden. The Routing Company in Washington State. North Carolina adds a 1% tax on rideshare services. Take-Me is an Israeli-based SaaS taxi solution taking on Gett and Yango. Gett partners with Taxi-Now to open a black-cab academy in London.
Sharing/renting 🚗🛴
Västtrafik, public transit authority in Sweden, partners with GoMore to offer car-share to residents. TrafiCar expands in Poland.
Micromobility 🚲🛴
Fluctuo’s Q2/23 European Shared Mobility Index key takeaways:
European micromobility fleet size increased by 7% across all modes, YoY.
Total ridership decreased by 1% YoY. This is attributed mostly to a 10% decrease in scooter usage, due to more stringent regulations. In addition, Paris removed 15,000 scooters from the city and Brussels to cut fleet size from 20,000 to 8,000 - those two cities amounted to 18%(!) of all scooter trips in Europe, so ridership is expected to decrease next Q as well.
Operators are switching to free-floating e-bikes (replacing scooters), adding 30,000 vehicles, while ridership grew by ‘only’ 24%.
Cars are the fastest growing mode, 14% increase in ridership with ‘only’ 6% fleet size increase.
Trips per Vehicle per Day (TVD): docked bikes 3.6, followed by mopeds 2.3, cars 1.8, scooters 1.6 and closing the list dockless bikes with 1.3.
For the full and very interesting report.
A study conducted with Lime finds out how low-income individuals differ in micromobility use; they are much more likely to use micromobility for shopping / errands (35% of all trips vs. 11% in non-low income general population) and for commute (31% vs. 21%); but less for social outings (12% vs. 23%), and joyrides & exploring (11% vs. 26%). More functional use, less recreational. Makes sense.
Superpedestrian launches in Basel, Switzerland. Nextbike expands in Gran Canaria. TrafiCar, car-sharing, is looking at entering micromobility. Forest renews presence in London.
Delivery 🍽🧺
Getir and UberEats partner, expanding the range of groceries available for Uber Eats’ users. UberEats has a number of supermarket partnerships in place (Tesco & Waitrose in the UK, Carrefour in France, Galp in Spain) but this partnership brings rapid-delivery into the product portfolio. Getir will see increased utilisation of its dark stores and drivers.
La Belle Vie acquires Frichti following the bankruptcy process. Frichti was acquired by Gorillas back in Q1/22, and in May 2023, when Getir (who acquires Gorillas) left France, Frichti was placed into administration. In July Frichti was given a three month extension to find a buyer, and now it has. La Belle Vie has been around since 2015, developing their own end-to-end online supermarket platform, recently achieving profitability. Frichti will be focusing on Parisian lifestyle consumers and will be downsized, decreasing the number of hubs from 16 to 4 and number of employees from 408 to 168.
Wonder to acquire Blue Apron. Blue Apron is a meal kit delivery company, once valued at $1.9bn, now being bought for $103M. Wonder is a premium meal delivery company. Together they intend to create a “mealtime super app, serving a broad range of occasions that feature cuisines from some of the world’s best chefs and restaurants”.
Thai food delivery Line Man Wongnai prepares for an IPO, with a rumoured valuation of $10bn. Grubhub and Choice Hotels partner to bring food delivery to 500 hotels. Guests are waived delivery fees and will enjoy one free month of Grubhub+ loyalty subscription scheme. Zipline can now operate commercial deliveries beyond the visual line of sight. Italian food delivery market - Deliveroo leads with 40% market share, followed by JET 33%, Glovo 22% and (soon to be departing?) UberEats 6%.
Autonomous & remote-driving 🤖℡
Mercedes-Benz’s Drive Pilot feature allows level 3 autonomy, or hands off wheel & eyes off road (in specific ODDs). Mercedes is a global leader, being the 1st company to put level 3 vehicles on road. A The Verge long-read account of the technology, legal implications and ride details.
Vay hired its 1st teledriver in the US. The company announced its US expansion four months ago, and seems now is closer to operations. Waymo in Miami. Cruise in Houston. Dubai’s robotaxis to launch next month, with Cruise. Austin residents voice concerns over self-driving cars.
Flying cars 🚁
Joby Aviation delivers 1st electric air-taxi to the US Air Force. This is the first ever eVTOL delivery in US history, a part of a $131M contract between Joby and the US Air Force. The vehicle will be inspected for people and delivery missions, and will see NASA testing the vehicle as well. Video. SK Telecom partners with Joby to kickstart UAM commercialization in Korea.
Gig economy 💰
Delivery companies DoorDash, Grubhub and Uber lose bid to block NYC minimum wage for delivery workers, effectively raising driver pay to $17.96 an hour (not to be confused with last week’s court win that allows these companies to be able to sue NYC over fee caps). City legislators and supporters praised the decision, saying it was needed as the average take home today is $11, less than the city’s $15 minimum wage. In the months since July these delivery companies threatened disruption of services if the law passes, so it will be very interesting and precedential to see what will happen now.
Brazilian delivery apps such as iFood and Rappi use facial recognition to detect child labour, but minors found ways around it, registering under a female family member. The apps allow customers and suppliers to report minors, but very few do.
Brazilian StopClub helps gig-drivers understand pay better by reading Uber and 99’s data and displaying the rate-per-km & rate-per-hour. Recently Uber took StopClub to court for violating copyright and competition rights - and lost.
In other news 📰
Finland lifts ban on transferring Yandex data to Russia - Finish regulator said that new information showed that the Russian legislation did not apply to taxi services. The UK rethinks its High Speed Rail, after costs tripled since the project started.
Water: EV boat startup Arc raises $70M to develop a watersports product.
Land: From 0 to 100 in 0.956 seconds.
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