Bird bails Bird, Cruise expands in the US; and a happy new year!

Happy and successful 2023 to all of us in the mobility industry! May we all reach profitability and increase growth & customer satisfaction. 

This new year, Bird saves itself (sort of); Bolt to Israel and Didi to the UK?; Singapore ride-hailing market; new 2022 micromobility map; Meituan (deliveries) reaches profitability; Barcelona to impose delivery tax on the rich; Cruise launches in Phoenix and Austin; Baidu drives at night; Air One is a flying car for the masses; the good and bad in Tesla; and a coach+scooter trial in New Zealand. Let’s start #movingpeople.

Bird bails Bird 🦆🛴

Bird Canada is bailing Bird Global, known simply as Bird, in a ‘reverse takeover’. If you follow micromobility you know Bird is in crisis: the company announced a going concern warning; the share price has been under $1 (as low as $0.15) and the company is facing delisting from NYSE; and a recent accounting disaster which caused the company to re-do its finances years back. In turn, valuation has sunk from $2.3Bn in May 2021 to ±$48M. Now Bird Canada is bailing its ‘parent’. 

Bird Canada is a independent, separate company, licensing the Bird name and software from Bird Global. The company says it is EBITDA positive, a unique situation for a micromobility company. Bird Canada will inject $32 in new financing, and will control the board. For more: Oversharing. TechCrunch. Toronto Star. 

The deal is done. 

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedRide-Hailing & Taxi, Buses & DRT  🚙🚐

An innovative new service comes from New Zealand - Mahu City Express is adding scooters onboard its electric coach fleet, to solve the first/last mile gap. Riders will use the same app they use today to book their bus rides, and will be able to book daily or weekly scooter uses. As far as I know, this is a world-first bus+scooter trial, and I’m curious to know whether the service will be successful in terms of rider growth, customer satisfaction and revenue. TBD. 

Is Bolt entering the Israeli market? The company is advertising for ‘private’ (non-taxi licensed) drivers to join the platform, but in Israel, gig-economy based services are illegal. Both Uber and Yandex operate a taxi based operation only, after fighting and folding to local regulation.

Is Didi entering the UK market? Again, an ad campaign implies so, plus the company had been registering for local licences in various UK cities. If so, Didi is facing a tough challenge vs. Uber, Bolt (and Ola), already operating in the UK. 

Singapore Q1/22 ride hailing market: Grab leads with ±51% and a 20% driver commissions; followed by Gojek, ±17.5% share and 10% commission; CDG with ±16% and ?. Tada with ±10% and no commission (here is how) and Ryde with ±6% and 10%. Lately, Grab increased its commission to 20.18% and Gojek to increase to 15% starting Feb. 1st. 

Autocab, an Uber-owned taxi dispatch software based in the UK, experienced increased losses. The company's pre-tax losses went from £676K to £1.6M in 2021, while revenue remained static at £8.5M. This is probably also attributed to the pandemic. More on Uber and taxis in a dedicated strategy paper that will come out soon. 

Careem introduces the first public network of electric bicycles and scooters in Medina. The scheme is expected to grow to 165 dock stations in several phases with 60 stations launched in the first year. In Pakistan, bike-hailing services have gained popularity over vehicles and taxis services due to skyrocketing fuel prices and inflation. Recently, women have also started using bike-hailing services as well. Lyft partners with EVgo to offer discounted charging for Lyft drivers. In High Wycombe (UK), a new DRT service launched in September 2022, saw 10,000 riders in 10 weeks. Mercedes takes part in series F investment for Blacklane. Money will be spent on electrification of vehicles and infrastructure. In Ireland, Free Now increases booking and cancellation fees. In the UAE, Careem captains can now cancel a trip after 10 minutes, if the customer does not arrive on time. DAN completes the acquisition of TST, a Portuguese public transport operator, for €83M.Uber supported Ukraine with $1.5M, matching individual contributions. 

Men arrested for hacking JFK taxi system. Between Nov. 2019 and Nov. 2020, the men were able to manipulate the system, allowing taxis to skip the queue for 10$, on an average of 1,000 taxis a day. 

DRT long read. Roger French’s review of a dozen DRT services in the UK. In North Yorkshire, a review by John Geddes found that “a single taxi could have been used 97.5% of the time passengers were carried at significantly less cost”. In Watford, the service is “carrying just 10% of the anticipated number of passengers in the Business Plan”. In Aberdeenshire, a “survey revealed 55 per cent of respondents would prefer a timetabled bus service”. And more criticism of the model in the review. Keep in mind that Mr. French is one of the leading voices against DRT, but there are some interesting points raised. 

Ride-hailing long read. Timothy B Lee from Full Stack Economics drove for Lyft for a week. After 100 rides and 46 hours, he earned $24.1 per hour, which is 52% of the total fare. And yet with its 48% cut, Lyft lost almost a billion dollars in the first nine months of 2022, which makes Lee believe that the ride-hailing model is broken. MD&A challenged his conclusion in a detailed report, claiming that, according to reports and various other industry sources, take-home for ride-hailing apps was only 20%. This good long read further analyses Lyft’s overhead, improvement over traditional taxi services and efficiencies of scale in the ride-hailing industry. 

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedSharing/renting 🚗🛴

Vay, remote human-operator controlled cars, gets an exemption permit to test rides without a safety driver on public roads. One of the use cases is for the technology to be used to get rental cars to/from clients. Hello Mobility electric scooter sharing service kicks off In Japan. 

Turo IPO will come, sooner than later. The company announced its intention to IPO almost a year ago, and has yet to actually do so. Turo says it has time, having sufficient cash flow to last for 12 more months. Revenue and users have been growing, yet in an updated S-1 filing, the company reported it doesn’t expect to generate net income consistently going forward. Not great news in this stock market. Its competitor, Getaround. SPACed early December, and has lost 90% of its value since.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedMicromobility 🚲🛴

Friedel’s micromobility update. 2022 saw more than 1,800 deployments of free floating e-scooters, bikes and mopeds. To the map.

A TechCrunch review of Micromobilty in Limbo: lessons from LA and Paris. Paris is highly regulated, but scooters have not been replacing cars, mostly replacing walking and public transport; they are used mostly by young middle-class men; and the safety concerns have been mounting; so the city might ban them starting Feb 2023. In LA, an open-vendor no-market-cap market makes it tough on profit generation (Lyft and Spin recently exited the city) but with six players still in the game, the market is highly competitive. Consolidation looms. 

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedDelivery 🍽🧺

Meituan, China-based delivery and bike-sharing, reached quarterly profit of 1.22Bn yuan / ±$180M. Foodpanda launches pandago, instant deliveries of small parcels, in Thailand, Taiwan and the Philippines. Zapp partners with Deliveroo, allowing customers across central London to shop Zapp’s catalogue directly via Deliveroo’s app. UberEats partners with Meijer to expand on-demand grocery delivery across the midwest US. E-cargo bike platform Cargoroo raises €10M. Funds will be used to expand the service across Europe. 

Barcelona plans to impose public space tax on large e-commerce delivery companies, to be applied only to companies that exceed €1M in annual gross income. The charge, dubbed the ‘Amazon tax’. is expected to be voted on in February 2023, before potentially coming into force in March.

Grubhub to pay DC $3.5 million over claims it charged customers hidden fees. Of that , $2.7M will go back to the customers. Offering fake ‘free’ deliveries, bundling different services in the same line, creating similar restaurants sites to divert traffic and more deceptive silicon valley tactics. 

Zipline and the Rwandan government extend partnership on delivery drones, adding new delivery sites in rural and urban locations throughout the country, with a goal to complete nearly 2 million instant deliveries and fly more than 200 million autonomous kilometres in the country by 2029. So far Zipline has delivered more than 450,000 packages to date, with 215,000 deliveries occurring this year alone.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedAutonomous 🤖

Cruise soft-launches robotaxi rides in Phoenix and Austin, as it had promised. For now, the service is open to “friends and family” of Cruise employees; here is no timeline for the general public. To some, this puts Cruise in the #1 position in the AV industry, ahead of Waymo and Tesla. Meanwhile, Cruise’s autonomous driving tech comes under scrutiny from safety regulators, as AVs  “may have engaged in inappropriately hard braking or became immobilized while operating on public roads”. Launch first, deal with NHTSA later. 

Baidu starts offering nighttime driverless taxis in China. Helm.ai raises $31M ($78M in total) to develop software that can understand sensor data like humans, to be used in autonomous vehicles. Video of a driverless ride in Arizona. 

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedFlying cars 🚁

AIR ONE performs test flights for an eVTOL targeted for short intercity commute by driver-pilots. A flying car for the masses; a car, not a taxi. The company hopes their prototype will hit the market at the end of 2024 at a base price of around €140,000. . 

EHang raises up to $20M investment with a Chinese state-backed urban and economic development zone. Eve Air Mobility receives lines of credit totaling $92.5 million from Brazil’s National Development Bank. The credit, which has a 12-year maturity period, will fund the development of Eve’s four-passenger eVTOL aircraft. Archer Aviation’s Midnight eVTOL moves a step closer to FAA certification. 

Legal dispute continues between early investors and Volocopter. This goes back to 2013 when Volocopter raised via a crowdsource, which is now hunting it as these early investors are asking for a bigger share of the pie. 

NYC helicopters cause noise complaints to soar by 678%. Pandemic, and work from home, increased those complaints, as houses are less soundproof than offices. The city is considering a bill banning non-essential helicopter traffic from city-owned heliports in Manhattan.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedManufacturers 🛺⚡️

Tough times for Tesla. Share price has constantly fallen from circa $300 per share in September to ±$200 beginning of December to ±$110 now. That has to do with discounts offered on vehicles raising fears of low demand and Elon is selling shares and focusing on Twitter. More on NY Times. NHTSA keeps investigating accidents involving FSD. Tesla is getting ready for layoffs. 

Alsp - Tesla reports 1.31 million deliveries in 2022, growth of 40% over last year (but missing analysts’ expectations). US EV Manufacturing Dataset. Tesla leads, others follow. The company is also planning a $10 billion Gigafactory in Mexico. Tesla Model Y is now the best-selling car in all of Europe. Tesla confirms 285,000 people bought Full Self-Driving. 

EV maker Lucid closes $1.5 billion raise. Lucid had about $3.85Bn in cash as of September 30, its most recent report. Rivian reportedly hits 25K production target for 2022 on final day of the year

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedGig workers 💸

In Paris, driver unions and platforms agreed on a minimum rate of 7.65 euros net for each accepted trip (€9 per trip including €7.65 for the driver). This agreement should be signed on Jan. 18th, and is expected to lead to a price increase for customers. 

In California, the legal status of Proposition 22 is unclear, but in effect for now, and is waiting for final ruling on whether it is constitutional or not. On a federal level, a Department of Labor proposed ruling could make it easier for independent contractors to gain full employment status if they are “economically dependent” on a company. 

Belgian court sides with Uber against driver seeking employee status. This is a win for Uber, albeit temporary as we’re all waiting for the EU regulation on “Improving working conditions of persons working through digital labour platforms. 

Uber, Ola and others blasted for poor working conditions for gig workers in India; full report here. In Zambia. Yango drivers protest over working conditions. 

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedIn other news 📰

Waze tests new alerts warning drivers about roads with a ‘history of crashes’. Vianova raises €6M to build a location data platform for shared mobility companies and cities. Helbiz travel insurance. A way to try and generate revenues, but I don’t see the connection here. 

How much founders pay themselves. 

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