Mexico "GTA", Berlin food fights and a green Bird - this week in mobility

Van “GTA” in Mexico

Uber van para empresas. A new Uber service in Mexico - designed for employee commute - is moving in on a fast growing industry segment. Almost all travel this past year massively declined, apart from essential employees. Essential employees kept on moving, and were practically the only revenue source for transportation companies. Now with office employees coming back to offices, combined with fear of public transportation and growing sustainability concerns, this ‘commute’ segment is going to continue growing. 

You might remember that six months ago Uber & Urbvan partnered, enabling Uber users to book on Urbvan routes. It seems that Uber liked the idea, and is now in direct competition with Urbvan. Is Uber going alone or is it a way to pressure Urbvan into a comfortable acquisition? Time will tell. 

Food fight in Germany

German food delivery scene is boiling. Getir is entering Berlin. Uber Eats is entering Berlin and this has caused a twitter fight between Just Eat Takeaway’s CEO Jitse Groen and Uber’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. It started with Jitse blaming Uber of trying to depress their share price, followed by Dara’s advice to Jitse to “pay a little less attention to your short term stock price and more attention to your Tech and Ops.” BURN. Jitse answered saying that Uber should “start paying taxes, minimum wage and social security premiums before giving a founder advice on how he should run his business.” I feel like a tabloid right now. 

Micromobility

During the pandemic the UK started to introduce e-scooters. Now Britons are getting to know both sides of micromobility. In Bristol. In Stokes. In Nottingham. In Bolton. The web is full of articles of both the pros and the cons. Scooters are now everywhere and if you don’t ride them you're probably not liking them. Voi is rolling out its fining feature in the UK - for people who do not park where they should. 

In greener news, Bird is going carbon neutral across the entire supply chain, offsetting all GHG related emissions in 2020, from manufacturing to recycling. Check out their new sustainability page. Also, Lime is pledging to use sustainable rubber. 

Wunder Mobility is launching Wunder Capital - a fleet financing solution. Wunder already supplies the software to micromobility providers, and is on way to be a one-stop-shop for new players wanting to launch micromobility services. 

Autonomous

Lyft sells its self-driving unit to Toyota for $550M. With autonomous abilities much more difficult than perceived at first, some 5 years ago. Lyft hopes that it could present a positive adjusted EBITDA in Q3 and to continue its partnership with various autonomous developers such as Hyundai and Waymo. Expect more consolidation, as autonomous costs mount to billions. Meanwhile, Toyota is completing its tailor-made for-autonomous-cars city. 

Keolis and Navya won a French public transportation tender to operate autonomous shuttles as part of the public transportation network. The shuttles, 3 in total, travel from a local business park and a train station in a 1.6km (1 mile) route. Apparently, some people jump in front of the vehicle just to see that it stops. It does. 

Hold on for self-driving cars on UK roads this year (small print: up to 60km/h on designated roads only, must be able to take over in under 10 seconds) 

Buses

BlaBlaCar is raising $115 with a three pillar strategy: carpooling, buses and aggregation. Adding trains soon, BlaBla chooses to focus first on a handful of countries so that it can sell everything a local would expect, by building multimodal capabilities. 

It probably helps that the French government is thinking of introducing a new scheme - that would give people €2,500 if they switch their car… for an e-bike. 

A new Italian player is emerging - Itabus. The company has 300 new buses and offers bus & train multimodality, competing directly with FlixBus. 

FirstGroup US operations - sold! - to EQT Infrastructure.

Gig employee relations - UK and Africa

Following Uber’s court loss which determined drivers as workers, Addison Lee is now in the spotlight, after getting an appeal rejected, the company now has to decide if it wants to take its (for now losing) case to the supreme court. Reminder: Uber lost there. Similarly to Uber, the company has a case rolling on courts relating to a very limited number of drivers (three in Addiso Lee’s case; six with Uber), but when Uber lost it eventually recognized all drivers as workers. What will Addison Lee do next?

In Africa, drivers are taking notes and are gearing up with their own legal battles. 

Bytes: Gett partnered with Curb Mobility to integrate its yello taxi operation, adding some 50K cabs into Gett’s inventory in the US. VIA launches first on-demand service in Delaware. DRT also in the West Midlands. Lilium names Munich and Nuremberg as southern air taxi hubs. The company is going to SPAC at a $3.3bn valuation, here is a market & company analysis. Deliveroo couriers are afraid to go into parts of Dublin. 

“Alexa, take me home”. Amazon has launched Alexa Transit, a service that allows trip planning. Currently available only in eight major US cities.