Movements | November 14th, 2018
Issue #23 — Brought to you by Michal Naka and Adam Feldman. If you’d like this newsletter delivered to your inbox every week, you can subscribe here.
Investments
In what is probably the most interesting deal we’ve seen yet, BlaBlaCar raises $114m in new financing from existing investors as well as France’s national railway company, SNCF. As part of the deal, BlaBlaCar is acquiring Ouisbus, the bus division of SNCF, and will continue to operate it. | TechCrunch
Transit App raises a $17.5m Series B from InMotion Ventures (Jaguar Land Rover) and Alliance Ventures (RenaultNissan-Mitsubishi), as well their existing investors, Accel and Real Ventures. | TechCrunch
Product Launches and Updates
TransitScreen looks to expand from the screen in your lobby to the one in your hand with the announcement of its ‘CityMotion’ mobile app. It includes private data sources like company and resident shuttles. | TransitScreen
Lyft is launching a rider loyalty program in December. | TechCrunch
Coord releases curb regulations for over 7,000 blocks in Los Angeles | Coord
Excellent thread on the latest in GPS technology from the Position, Navigation, and Time Symposium at Stanford. New satellites and capabilities are coming, along with better cooperation with Gallileo (EU) and BeiDou (China). Great stat: GPS produces $37–$75B in direct economic benefits every year. | Drew Dara-Abrams
Like Grab in southeast Asia, Careem is embracing it’s position as a consumer distribution channel and experimenting with a peer to peer credit transfer system. | Careem
Fantasmo launches some neat VPS and AR tools to help scooter operators. | TechCrunch
Micromobility
In this week’s category blurring news, Ford acquires Spin. | Axios
Not to be outdone by Ford, Lime launches a carsharing services in Seattle. | Bloomberg
Lime continues its executive hiring spree: former GV general partner and Lime investor Joe Kraus joins as COO. | Bloomberg Interview
Former Apple and Tesla supply-chain executive was hired to lead Lyft’s bike and scooter division. | The Information’
Lime hits 20 million total trips in 15 months and is now doing about ~7 million trips per month. Related: When will scooter companies overtake ridehailing companies? | Lime
Scooter supplier Ninebot plans to unveil a ‘small electric car’ next year. | CNN
Jump released a report claiming that they could do 1m rides per day in NYC with 100,000–200,000 bikes, if they were allowed to deploy in the areas where Citi Bike has an exclusive contract. Citi Bike has since responded saying they could do similar numbers if they were allowed to expand. | Steer Group
The scooter vehicle design explosion continues: three new models went on preorder this week! Inboard Glider, the Unicorn Scooter, and the Unagi scooter from former Beats music CEO. | TechCrunch
TNCs
One of the central themes we’ve seen across a few different markets is how TNCs transition from providing transportation services to monetizing their unique distribution channels. In search of growth, Grab and Careem have focused on going broader with transactional services for consumers, Uber and Lyft have gone deeper into transportation (scooters, bikes) and logistics (food delivery) for consumers, and Didi has begun to focus on drivers — “Didi is beginning to help drivers do things like buy car insurance, maintain their cars and get fuel. In April, Didi launched an auto service platform to provide car leases and trades, gas station services and auto maintenance services. Didi’s thinking is it can use its size to get lower prices which it can pass onto its drivers.” | The Information
European ridehailing firm Taxify has reported ‘tens of thousands of trips” on scooters each day in Paris, with “40% of rides done by existing Taxify users”. Looks like Taxify views scooters as part of their customer acquisition strategy in competitive ridehailing markets. | CNBC
Cities and Policy
Washington DC, one of the first US cities to have a dockless mobility pilot, has proposed new program rules slated to start in January 2019. The city looks to increase the cap from 400 to 600 vehicles per operator, plus the ability to increase it by 25% each quarter. There’s also a proposal to limit scooter top speeds to 10mph and ebike speeds to 20mph. Bird and Lime have pushed back on both of these proposed measures. | DDOT
Santa Monica has created on-street drop zones for e-scooters and e-bikes. They’re hoping to create over 100 of them. | Rick Cole
A tale of two cities: Portland is ending its scooter pilot next week to complete a program analysis, while Long Beach extends its pilot as it completes its analysis. | Press Telegram
Cities are charging scooter and e-bike companies road use fees to fund infrastructure. Which of course begs the question, why not do more of the same for cars? | Wired
OEMs
European commission clears the Daimler-BMW mobility joint venture with 5 verticals: carshare, charging, ride hailing, parking and mobility aggregation. | FleetNews
Millennials. They don’t really like cars. | The Chicago Tribune
GM is opening up its P2P carshare platform Maven to non-GM branded vehicles. Side note: I used Maven last weekend in NYC and it was actually pretty awesome.| TechCrunch
Interviews
A discussion with Josh Mohrer, formerly of Uber NYC | Working Capital Review
An interesting interview with Jim Hackett, CEO of Ford, about the company’s transformation goals | Freakonomics
