To stay in the running against American Uber and Lyft or Chinese Didi, Daimler and BMW join forces. The two German manufacturers, who usually fight for the first place in the podium on the high-end segment, Wednesday announced the signing of an agreement to merge their mobility services Car2go and DriveNow.
The operation, which has yet to be validated by competition authorities, was expected in Germany: Daimler and BMW have recently acquired their respective holdings in Car2go and DriveNow carsharing services from Europcar and Sixt, with whom they had allied themselves in this field. This in order to freely marry their activities.
Specifically, Daimler and BMW will form a new joint venture equally owned. The entity, which should weigh more than 1 billion euros, will have 20,000 cars and 4 million customers in 31 cities. “This makes them the world’s leading car-sharing player, ahead of the Chinese EV Card. A two, they achieve more than 30 million trips a year, it’s huge. This will move the market, “says Grégory Ducongé, the boss of Vulog, a specialist in the field.
Beyond carsharing, all the mobility services, in which the two manufacturers have invested for several years, will be integrated into this new joint venture: taxi booking applications, such as Mytaxi, the Private chauffeur of which Daimler has acquired a majority stake , or applications to book all types of urban transport (ReachNow, moovel), to find a charging station for an electric vehicle, or a parking space.
Faced with rampant urbanization and new digital tools, builders feel the urgency to turn into service providers, in addition to their historical business as an industrialist.
Do not leave the field free
“In the future, more people than today will give up their own cars in urban areas, but they will still want to be very mobile,” said Dieter Zetsche, Daimler’s boss. “As automotive pioneers, we will not leave the field open to others when it comes to the urban mobility of the future,” he says.
Same speech from BMW CEO Harald Krüger, who wants to launch “a signal towards new competitors”. With this operation, the German giants of the automobile also demonstrate that they know how to regroup their forces in case of danger, even if they do not hesitate to denounce themselves to the competition authorities , when they feel the interest.
The two manufacturers, who expect a slight increase in profits if the operation is validated this year, are not their first alliance. They are already allied with their compatriot Volkswagen and the equipment manufacturers Continental and Bosch in the digital mapping.