Voi new to London

Voi new to London, NACS wins, gig-economy sues NYC

Ride-Hailing & Taxi, Buses & DRT 🚙🚐

Addison Lee acquires Green Tomato Cars, sustainable private hire, and Brunel, ground transport provider, strengthening the company’s position in corporate travel. Addison Lee’s fleet now counts over 7,500 vehicles.

The Canary Islands are blocking the likes of Uber and Cabify, rejecting 3,400 applications for licences of rental vehicles with a driver (VTC) on the island. The island government says it does not want ride-hailing to hurt the local taxi industry, which has ‘only’ 2,656 licences, making the number of VTC applications “absurd”.

Blablacar is on track to EBITDA profitability. A Sifted read tells the story of the company; from a promising carpooling startup to a multimodal platform and the challenges caused by the pandemic; investment in the Russian market that was a success until Russia invaded Ukraine; and slow expansion to foreign markets. Today Blabla operates in 21 countries, which constitute 80% of the company’s revenue, and is looking to IPO in 2024.

Bolt hires a new CFO as it prepares for an IPO. Bolt has 150 million customers across 45 countries and the company expects to hit profitability in the next 12 months.

The Routing Company (TRC) to launch microtransit in Sonoma County, California. ioki partners with Arriva to launch DRT in Cremona, Italy. Wellington, New Zealand, extends DRT scheme by Transdev.

Jonathan Hampson, Via’s UK head, left the company. Read his post. Jonathan was very influential in setting up the DRT market in the UK; Via today is the UK market leader with an estimated 70% of the market.

East Leeds DRT gets terminated early. Roger French calculated the service had 0.8 journeys per bus per hour. A report by the transport committee sums that “cost… works out at £16.03 per passenger trip on average” and that “scheduling algorithm had limited success in combing customer journey requests to maximise vehicle utilisation”. Note that the solution behind the scheme was by 365, not one of the more established DRT players.

Muva is a DRT service in East Berlin run by BVG, the main public transport operator in the city, and Via. The service started in September 2022, and figures so far are discouraging.

In Brazil, 99 (by Didi) and BYD partnered to put 300 EVs on the road.

In Saudi Arabia, ride-hailing is undersupplied leading to ‘terrible’ service with cancellation rates close to 50%. This is mainly caused by two regulations that limits the available pool of drivers: the first determining that only Saudi nationals can work as drivers, in a country where 40% of population are foreigners and women effectively don’t drive (legally can since 2018 but numbers are small); the second that ride-hailing cars must be less than five years old (recently changed to seven) and owned by their drivers. On top of that, many of the drivers are only true gig-drivers, i.e. not full timers but moonlight outside of their day job, meaning availability during rush hours is low.

In Nigeria, where fuel prices have soared more than threefold, InDrive and Armenia-based Rida both offer a ‘negotiation’ feature, allowing riders and drivers to negotiate ride fare between them. This article has pricing examples in it.

Sharing/renting 🚗🛴

Finn, German and US car subscription, signed a €25M asset-backed facility, bringing the total to $1bn in funding, circa 75% of it in debt financing.

Onto, EV monthly subscription company, sees funding from L&G cut. This puts the company in danger of administration, after seeing £22.5M investment from L&G in the past three months. Total funds so far $350M. Higher interest rates and drop in residual value of EVs probably contributed to L&G’s decision.

Enterprise expands to Morocco, South Africa and South Korea with new franchises.

Micromobility 🚲🛴

London: Dott, Lime (renewed) and Voi (replaced Tier) selected as trial expansion operators by TfL. The extension takes place from September 2023 to May 2024, with an option for additional extensions.

HelloRide expands bike fleet in Singapore. The Chinese company has been operating 1,000 shared bikes for the past year, and now will grow the fleet to 10,000. It is 2nd to Anywheel, which operates 30,000 bikes in the region. SG Bike saw its licence reduce to 1,500, from 5,000. Singapore has 41,500 bikes on its street, down from 200,000 in early 2018.

Bird joins micromobility operators in issuing industry recommendations. The current coalition includes Dott, Lime, Superpedestrian, Tier and Voi - Bird was the only large player missing.

Neuron in Coquitlam, Canada, introducing 300 scooters and 100 bikes. Bird in Montreal, Canada, introducing 200 scooters.

A wave of vandalism in Manchester hurt Beryl’s Bee Bikes - who now have ±400 available bikes on the streets from its 1,000 bike fleet. Back in 2018 Mobikes left the city for the same reason.

Shared e-scooters hardware evolution by Friedel.

Delivery 🍽🧺

DoorDash ends NYC experiment to deliver grocery orders within 15 minutes. DoorDash expands in Auckland, New Zealand. The company has been operating in two other cities for the past year.

Indian market: Zomato grows to 2022 food delivery market share to 55% vs. Swiggy’s 45%. Back in 2018 Swiggy had 61% market share, which has fallen consistently Year on year. Zomato's Indonesian subsidiary initiates liquidation process. The company announced its intention earlier this year.

Mango Logistics Group acquires Delta Express. The London-based company is looking for additional acquisitions.

Meituan launches fourth generation drones for urban delivery. Maximum distance of 10km (35% increase vs. 3rd gen drone), better weather and night flying and the ability to cover a 3km radius order within 15 minutes.

Autonomous & remote-driving 🤖

VW to start testing the autonomous ID Buzz in Austin, ahead of a planned commercial launch in 2026. This follows testing in Germany, where vehicles are aimed to be used as robo-taxis. Mobileye is VW’s autonomous tech partner.

WeRide is given a self-driving licence in the UAE, allowing the company to test level-4 vehicles on public roads. The company has already been running limited public testing for the past year.

Vay joins Halo.Car in Las Vegas in remote-driving operations, setting its first US office in the city.

Sensible 4 ending is not a happy one. The Finnish six years old autonomous startup is shutting down, after failing to raise an additional round. Total funding raised was $17.1M, with the latest round in August 2022.

TuSimple may sell its U.S. business to focus on autonomous freight in the Asia-Pacific region. Meanwhile, the company is waiting for Nasdaq to decide if to delist the company, after compliance failures over the past six months.

The connection between Apple, autonomous cars spotted in Arizona, and Route 14 Investment Partners.

“Safe Street Rebel” is a local San Francisco group resisting autonomous vehicles - by putting cones on their hoods they are able to stop the car in place. The extreme group aims to increase public transport planning, and get rid of both human and non-human cars.

See Peugeot-Citroën’s ADAS/autonomous system - in a 1990 video article.

Flying cars 🚁

Alef - a true ‘flying car’ - received special airworthiness certification From the FAA. The company has 440 pre-orders, at $300,000 each, representing $132M in revenue. Deliveries planned for the end of 2025.

OEMs 🛺⚡️

Rivian delivers first European electric vans to Amazon. 300 vehicles will be deployed in Germany.

Faraday Future raises $90M from existing investors to stay afloat.

Arrival’s 2nd SPAC is cancelled. It also might be the 1st mobility company (from the group of SPAC companies emerging in the past years) to be delisted from Nasdaq due to non-compliance.

Tesla’s NACS can be declared as the winner. Recent weeks had news of GM, Ford, Volvo and others adopting the standard, and this week adds Mercedes-Benz, ChargePoint, the State of Kentucky and the SAE International. That means that in the future, we will see NACS at least side-by-side the CCS, potentially beating CCS, the current charging standard.

Gig economy 💰

Uber and DoorDash and Grubhub sue New York City over minimum wage law. The law, mandating a minimum hourly wage of $17.96 per hour or 50c per minute active, up from average of $7.09 today, is set to enter into effect July 12th. There are an estimated 60,000 delivery workers in the city.

In Turkey, Getir workers - via a subcontracted courier company - are protesting against low wage increases and unequal pay rates across different regions.

In other news 📰

A couple of weeks ago I reported that Yandex was fined by a Russian court for failing to turn over user data to the FSB (better known for its old name, the KGB). Usually, going against the FSB isn’t a wise thing. Well, it turns out that Yandex’s CEO is now facing administrative (not criminal) charges for violating Russia’s new “LGBT propaganda” law. Also on the Yandex front - the company is continuing to diversify control to the Netherlands; looks to increase number of employees in Serbia; while the FSB expands surveillance on taxi journeys.

RapidFlight, an unmanned aircraft manufacturing company, acquires Local Motor’s intellectual property. Local Motors, founded in 2007 and shut down in early 2022, was a pioneer in the manufacturing of autonomous shuttles.

A look at TMNT’s travel and mobility market index. Both travel and mobility underperformed S&P 500 the past year; mobility did worse than travel.