The station is a weekly communication, dedicated to all transportation. Sign up here — just click on The Station — to receive it in your inbox every weekend.
Hello readers: Welcome to The Station, which is your central hub for all the ways you transport people and packages from point A to point B in the past, present and future.
I have been in Los Angeles last week to meet startups, investors, and of course visit the Los Angeles Auto Show. So considering my busy schedule, I handed the reins to Aria Alamalhodaei. See you next week.
As always, you can email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, comments or tips. You can also send me a message directly on Twitter — @kirstenkorosec.
Let us start the day with cheers. On Saturday night last week, the cries of electric bicycles were played in the program's "Weekend Update" news anchor skit.
"A new report shows that the fastest-growing form of electric vehicles is electric bicycles, which are especially popular in cities," said comedian Michael Che. "At this point, experts believe that the only thing that can slow these bicycles is the door."
Che summed up the irony behind the growing popularity of electric bicycles in just a few sentences. Despite the increase in usage and changes in methods, unfortunately, cars remain the king of the concrete jungle—at least until cities are strengthened and prioritized more equitable and environmentally friendly modes of transportation.
Although the agreement to end vehicle emissions by 2040 has not been fully reached at COP26, a new report shows that urban residents need to start walking, biking, micro-transportation or public transportation within the next 10 years, otherwise we will not be able to achieve our Climate goals.
Some cities are making progress. Some cities in the United States, such as Oakland, Bakersfield, and Pittsburgh, have begun to experiment with "Universal Basic Mobility" pilots, subsidizing buses, electric scooters, and electric bicycles to allow people to travel more freely. The ultimate goal is to bring more economic activity to the city.
At the CoMotion LA Urban Mobility Conference, Spin announced that it will become one of the micro-transportation companies working with Bakersfield local community non-profit organizations (such as the Dream Center) to identify 100 eligible participants to get free public transportation. Spin electric scooters and electric bicycles for one year. Bakersfield will become Spin's third UBM pilot.
During the event, Spin also announced a partnership with Blue Systems to provide data dashboards for selected U.S. cities to improve pedestrian safety and eliminate sidewalk riding and improper parking.
Fetch.ai is an artificial intelligence laboratory with an open decentralized ML network for smart infrastructure. It has cooperated with the blockchain company Datarella to launch the MOBIX micro-mobile market. The platform is expected to encourage users to use micro-mobiles through rewards. Mobile services. MOBIX users can earn miles by recording micro-mobile trips, which can then be converted into tokens for future trips or transactions on cryptocurrency exchanges. Users anywhere can download the application on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
Lime collaborates with SafeUP, a community safety network that provides guardians for women who feel unsafe. SafeUP guardians in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Miami, Washington DC, Austin and Tel Aviv provide free Lime scooters and bicycles.
Since becoming a listed company through SPAC, Bird has held its first public earnings conference call. The company's revenue is only slightly lower than expected, but the company has increased its guidance for the full year of 2021. It relies on the growth of commuting and tourism, as well as the alleviation of supply chain constraints.
Australian startup Zoomo has raised US$60 million in Series B financing to expand its electric bike subscription service. The company provides electric bicycles for odd jobs or corporate fleets, and hopes to disrupt the last mile delivery industry.
Zembo is a French start-up company that started business in Uganda. It raised US$3.4 million and started to expand its business throughout Africa through the rent-and-buy plan to sell electric motorcycles. It is supported by Mobility 54, Toyota Tsusho's corporate venture capital subsidiary, which will use Toyota's automotive footprint to help Zembo expand.
Superpedestrian is the latest micro mobile operator to appear in the Moovit app after Lime, Spin and Bird. Now, Moovit users who plan to use the app to travel will be able to find available LINK scooters.
Lyft is expanding its partnership with MasterCard in the Bay Area to include bike sharing. Mastercard will help Bay Wheels on the Lyft app to build another 35 bike-sharing sites next year.
Also in San Francisco, Scoot/Bird partnered with Scootaround to pilot a barrier-free travel plan in the city. The program was initially piloted in the Bronx, allowing passengers with disabilities to find, book and pay for one of three types of accessible vehicles.
Tier's acquisition of Nextbike, a German bike-sharing platform, marks the company's commitment to a multi-modal approach and the possibility of more micro-mobile integration in the future.
Electric scooter manufacturer Niu hinted that it will expand its urban mobility product portfolio at the EICMA or Milan Motorcycle Show next week. This sounds like a new type of vehicle, and Electrek speculates that it may be the three-wheeled canopy scooter concept that the company demonstrated at the 2020 International Consumer Electronics Show. Fingers crossed! The micro-traffic world really needs a solution for rainy days.
Last week was about Rivian's hyped IPO. This week I want to talk about Lucid Group, which completed the first quarter as a public company this week. After the stock price rose and its valuation increased by $17 billion, its market value now seems to surpass Ford and General Motors.
What will happen next to the new electric vehicle entrants? According to the investor's statement on the earnings call, the delivery volume is Lucid Air Dream Edition first, followed by Grand Touring, Touring and Air Pure. CEO Peter Rowlinson said he believes the company will be able to produce 20,000 cars next year.
At the same time, it is reported that the number of bookings has increased from approximately 13,000 at the end of the third quarter to 17,000.
Another big thing to watch this week—or, more accurately, a dead deal—Ford CEO Jim Farley said on Friday that the automaker has ended its car partnership with Rivian. The company remains Rivian's major shareholder.
Transactions that caught our attention...
Eatron raised $11 million to expand its technology platform, enabling OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers to separate automotive software from their hardware. The A round of financing was led by UK-based MMC Ventures.
Helm.ai raised $26 million in Series B financing to expand its ADAS and level 4 driving software development. JM Partners, Base Capital Funding and Freeman Group participated, as well as Nicolas Berggruen, ACVC Partners, OneWay Ventures, Binnacle Partners, Nadia Asoyan, Vlad Tenev, Mark Leslie, Jeff Rothschild and Neil King.
Mangrove Lithium is a company that has developed a platform for the production of battery-grade lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate. The company completed a US$10 million Series A financing led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
Merchants Fleet placed an order for 5,400 EV410 vans from GM's BrightDrop electric delivery department. This brings the company's total orders to 18,000 units, including the previous commitment to purchase 12,600 BrightDrop's flagship EV600 vans.
Mitra Chem has raised US$20 million in Series A financing to promote the North American battery supply chain industry currently dominated by China by producing iron-based cathodes for non-Chinese applications.
Nexar, a company known for its smart driving recorder series, raised $53 million in new financing to expand the scale of its "digital twin" service, which is based on crowdsourced driving for car OEMs and cities Recorder lens.
PreAct Technologies, a company that develops sensor technology for automotive applications, raised $13 million in a Series A financing led by State Farm Ventures.
Sono Motors' parent company, Sono Group, went public this week, and its share price hit a high of US$38.74 before the market closed. Sono Motors is developing a solar-powered electric car, which it said will reach consumers in the first half of 2023.
Swvl is acquiring a controlling stake in Viapool, a transportation platform operating in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Santiago, Chile. This is the latest sign that the company is expanding its influence in Latin America. The transaction is expected to be completed in the first quarter of next year.
Zoomo raised $60 million in Series B financing to expand its last-mile electric delivery service, which includes fleet products and subscription services for couriers and deliverymen.
Hello everyone! Welcome back to the policy corner.
The $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill contains a lot of new regulations and funding for vehicles. The huge budgets for electric vehicle charging and electric school buses have always been the most eye-catching, but they are far from the only important provisions in the legislation.
The Infrastructure Act also focuses on driver safety. In addition to the introduction of anti-drunk driving technology regulations in new cars, the legislation also opened the door for adaptive headlights to enter the United States. Within 24 months, the Secretary of Transportation will be required to amend the regulations on headlights "to allow use in vehicles with adaptive high beam systems." This means that soon, there will no longer be two modes of headlights in the United States. -Bright and super bright-but can dynamically respond to the environment and adjust the brightness and beam illumination accordingly.
The bill also authorizes the Secretary of Transportation to decide when to enforce the use of technologies such as automatic emergency braking, lane assist, and forward collision warning. Read: When, not if. This means that these features will soon be applicable to all new cars. The car may also need to be equipped with a rear seat occupancy warning to prevent pets or children from staying in the rear seat.
Other news that caught my attention this week...
The New York City Council is considering a bill that would require the Taxi and Limousine Committee to develop a set of rules related to the licensing and use of driverless cars as taxis. It seems that the state is trying to take a proactive approach to this technology.
The Autonomous Driving Alliance is drawing the line: it wants policymakers, journalists (hello!) and other stakeholders to clearly distinguish between autonomous driving systems and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). The organization has long insisted — right in our opinion — that mixing these two technologies together could lead to driver abuse of ADAS without fully understanding its capabilities and limitations.
The California Energy Commission approved an amazing plan costing 1.4 billion US dollars to promote the popularization of electric vehicles, of which nearly 80% of the funds are dedicated to electric vehicle charging and hydrogen refueling stations. It is worth noting that most of them are used for chargers for medium and heavy infrastructures-buses, school buses and trucks.
According to reports, Apple is taking steps to develop its electric cars and plans to make them self-driving. The "fluid" plan is to prepare the car before 2025, but Apple has encountered a series of setbacks on this car, and it declined to comment on this news.
Baidu believes that based on its 115,000 rides, it has the world's largest robotic taxi service. The company's CEO Robin Li stated on the earnings call that the goal of Apollo Go's services is to be in 65 cities by 2025 and 100 cities by 2030.
Baraja released a lidar system, which said it was ready to "achieve level 4 autonomy on a large scale." Spectrum HD will cost less than $1,000 and will provide samples next year.
Honda is developing an off-road automatic operation vehicle and testing it on the solar panel construction site. These vehicles can tow up to 1,653 pounds of trailers and transport up to 880 pounds of construction materials on 1,000 acres of construction sites.
Xiaoma Zhixing reorganized its passenger car and self-driving truck R&D department in September. TechCrunch has since learned about some key executives, at least one of whom believes that there should be separate product teams for different use cases of urban driving and highway driving. Two of the employees left and started their own L4 freight business. The source confirmed to TechCrunch that Pony's automated trucking business in the United States has been suspended, but the company is still testing in China.
Qualcomm is working with the BMW Group to design and develop BMW's next-generation ADAS and automated system stack.
REE Automotive launched a fully automatic concept car based on a new ultra-modular EV platform design. The concept is suitable for last-mile self-driving and electric delivery companies, fleet operators, e-retailers, and technology companies that want to build fully autonomous solutions.
The Los Angeles Auto Show is held this week, let’s start with some of the top automakers’ displays:
Biliti Electric announced at the event that it hopes to bring its electric tuk-tuk to the US market. Three-wheel open-cabin electric delivery trucks have been used in Asia and Europe, and may be the last mile delivery solution in the United States
Fisker's all-electric Ocean SUV debuted with a rotating screen, which is one of the obvious highlights of the manufacturer Foxconn. Fisker's first EV will be equipped with a 17.1-inch central screen that can be rotated from portrait mode to landscape mode depending on whether the driver is using GPS or just relaxing and watching a movie in the car.
Hyundai launched the Hyundai SEVEN concept car with "hygienic" interior because of ew, COVID. The concept is based on a modern electric global modular platform, which is the same as the Ioniq 5 platform and has a lounge-like interior, rotatable seats and a lot of small hygiene items. For example, sanitary airflow systems for custom airflow and UVC sterilization cycles.
Porsche has launched the Taycan GTS sedan and the third body style named Taycan GTS Sport Turismo, completing the Taycan automotive product portfolio. The company has invested more than $1 billion in development.
Subaru showed off its first all-electric crossover 2023 Subaru Solterra. The crossover signifies that Subaru is catering to American audiences and trying to gain a foothold in the electric car market.
Toyota bZ4X, a clone of the new Subaru, was also unveiled at the Los Angeles Auto Show. This is the first electric car under the Toyota bZ brand. It is expected to enter the United States in the middle of 2022, with an estimated cruising range of 250 miles.
Canoo announced plans to establish its headquarters and advanced manufacturing industrial chemical plant in Bentonville, Arkansas. (Did we find a future deal with Walmart?). During the company's third-quarter earnings conference call, Canoo stated that it is close to producing cars on its gamma platform. The company also announced that Panasonic is its battery supplier and plans to establish technology centers in Tulsa and Fayetteville.
The luxury electric car startup Lucid Group completed the first quarter of a public company after merging with Churchill Capital IV Corp in July. The company shared that since the end of the third quarter, it has received reservations for 17,000 electric vehicles.
Caribou is working with Uber to provide its car refinancing process to drivers of the ride-sharing giant who can access the UberPro app.
DoorDash launched a new business unit called DoorDash Labs, which focuses on robotics and automation. The company hired Zoox's former senior vice president, Ashu Rege, as the vice president of Autonomy.
Joanna Wu, a long-time LinkedIn executive, will switch to Uber. Mr. Wu, who has decades of experience in user experience and product design, led the comprehensive redesign of the LinkedIn website and apps. She will serve as Uber's vice president of product design starting in January.
A new report from Jupiter Research shows that by 2026, the volume of in-car transactions will exceed a staggering US$4.7 billion, and will increase by 5,300% in the next five years.
Zipline launched a commercial service in the United States this week, using its self-driving aircraft to deliver goods in northwest Arkansas on behalf of Wal-Mart.