E-bikes and autonomous vehicles take over urban mobility
Welcome to our weekly news highlights by Splyt, the place where you‘ll find the most relevant information about the urban mobility scene. Follow us for updated news, we post every Tuesday! Here is what happened last week:
E-bikes — add them to your fleet, or stay behind
As the bikesharing industry and competition within grows, companies are looking to offer more to its clients to win over some market share. Motivate, the bikesharing company in San Francisco is adding a pedal-assist to Ford’s GoBikes. However, they are not the only ones — Spin is doing the same. But wait, so is LimeBike! As Motivate plans to roll the e-bikes out in April, LimeBike will already be offering these by the end of the month in San Francisco, Miami and Seattle. If, essentially, all of these companies will be offering the same, they will need to look for further ways to differentiate themselves from the competition. The question is, what will this be?
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Ford GoBikes are going electric in San FranciscoMotivate, the company behind the San Francisco Yay (Bay) Area’s bike-share system, is adding pedal-assist e-bikes to…techcrunch.comSpin unveils its stationless electric bikeSpin is adding an electric bike to its fleet of station-less bicycles for bike sharing. The Spin bike can travel up to…techcrunch.comLimeBike unveils pedal assist e-bikesOn the heels of Motivate’s announcement that it’s launching an e-bike pilot program in San Francisco, startup LimeBike…techcrunch.com
Didi acquires Bluegogo
When it comes to mobility, China’s Didi is definitely not staying behind. If the current trend in urban mobility is bikesharing, Didi is fully aware. In preparation to entering the market, Didi has acquired bikesharing company Bluegogo.
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Didi Chuxing to acquire cash-strapped bike-sharing firm BluegogoMore than a year after taking over the operations of Uber Technologies in China, Didi Chuxing is looking poised to…www.scmp.comUber-Slayer Didi Is Moving to Shake Up Chinese Bike-Sharingbecame China’s reigning car-hailing service by pummeling Uber into submission. Now it wants to do the same in bike…www.bloomberg.com
Didi takes over Brazil’s 99
As part of its international expansion strategy (and pretty much following its quest to dominate urban mobility globally) Didi Chuxing is to acquire Brazil’s 99. Sources close to the deal say that the Chinese ride-hailing giant is acquiring 99 for $600 million, raising the company’s valuation to $1 billion. The competition to Uber in Brazil is likely to get even fiercer with with this acquisition.
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Didi Chuxing, China’s ride-hailing giant, reportedly just bought Uber’s Brazilian rivalMichael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images Didi Chuxing, the Chinese ride-sharing company, has agreed to acquire full…www.cnbc.com
Renault, Nissan, Mitsubishi unite for AVs
Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi Motors formed an alliance to bring to life their autonomous vehicle ambitions. The three carmakers, who collectively spent $8.3 billion on research and development last year, are looking into partnerships with tech giants the likes of Google and Uber, who are already experimenting with self-driving cars and have had years of expertise.
“Tech companies aren’t going to build and sell cars to our current customers,” said Ogi Redzic, a Senior Vice-President of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance — “We envision that partnerships are possible.”
The initiative has ambitious, but seemingly realistic plans of 15 models with autonomous features, as well as a Level 5 fully self-driving vehicle by 2022. There is, however, major competition from all sides with General Motors vowing to be the first to produce a mass market AV.
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Renault, Nissan, Mitsubishi seek robo-taxi deals with tech companiesPARIS — Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi Motors are lining up partners for their push into shared driverless robo-taxis…europe.autonews.com
AImotive closes funding round
Lead by B Capital Ground and Prime Ventures, the Budapest-based startup AImotive has recently raised $38 million series C funding round. Other investors include Cisco, Samsung and Bosch.
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AImotive, Leading Provider of Camera-First Autonomous Driving Technology, Raises $38 Million USD…AImotive will use this new round of funding to continue developing its proprietary autonomous driving technology, which…www.prnewswire.comAImotive Raises $38M in Series C FundingAImotive , a Budapest, Hungary-based full-stack autonomous vehicle technology company, closed a its $38m Series C…www.finsmes.com
Nvidia reveals its impressive coverage of the autonomous market
At Consumer Electronics Show 2018 (CES) in Las Vegas, Nvidia, a hardware and software company most renowned for its Graphics Processing Units (GPU) used mostly for video games and 3D rendering, has revealed a multitude of partnerships it has struck up with various mobility players, including Uber, Baidu, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla, Audi, Zoox, Navya and many more (find the list of partners in the link below). Promising superior processing power for assisted and autonomous driving, as well as augmented reality dashboard information, Nvidia has an unprecedented coverage of the new mobility market.
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Innovations by Automotive Industry Partners and NVIDIA DRIVELearn how Audi, Tesla, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Honda use NVIDIA DRIVE to design the cars of tomorrowwww.nvidia.comBaidu and ZF tap Nvidia Drive for self-driving compute techNvidia announced at its CES 2018 keynote that it’s now partnering with two Chinese companies on bringing autonomous…techcrunch.comUber taps Nvidia for its self-driving vehicle fleetUber has picked Nvidia as one of its key technology partners in its fleet of self-driving, specifically to provide the…techcrunch.comNvidia is finally releasing its self-driving car chipThis week at CES the company announced that it’s finally making Xavier, an AI chip made for self-driving vehicles that…www.theverge.com
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