The Station Archives - Product Management Confabulation

March 20, 2023

Cruise Origin rolls into Austin, WeRide makes its IPO move and TuSimple stirs up more drama

Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B.

I’m back from SXSW! During my time there, I met with lots of founders and investors who had more to discuss than just the SVB collapse. Although that certainly dominated many conversations. Transportation didn’t take center stage in Austin like it did in 2018 or 2019, but there was a presence. And autonomous vehicle technology was one the main topics (yes, believe it or not!). Another theme was climate tech and what role transportation might play in the mitigation or adaptation to our changing world.

And finally, I sat down with GM CEO and Chair Mary Barra after her talk on stage (alongside Cruise co-founder and CEO Kyle Vogt). We covered a lot of ground and stay tuned for highlights this coming week.

(Side note: You can find all of our coverage on the collapse of SVB here.)

Join the transpo team’s Rebecca Bellan next week as she hosts TechCrunch Live. Bellan will be speaking with Eric Tarczynski of Contrary Capital and Harshita Arora, co-founder of AtoB, a startup building a payments system for trucking, logistics and fleets.They’ll discuss why venture capital should look at people before businesses, why fintech should be the cornerstone of a business, not a side project, and the reign of the Girl Genius.

Tune in on Wednesday, March 22 at 11:30 a.m. PT / 2:30 p.m. ET. You can register for the event here.

Want to reach out with a tip, comment or complaint? Email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com. You also can send a direct message to @kirstenkorosec

Reminder that you can drop us a note at tips@techcrunch.com. If you prefer to remain anonymous, click here to contact us, which includes SecureDrop (instructions here) and various encrypted messaging apps.

Micromobbin’

Brisk EV says it’s the longest range moped in India with the ability to ride 207 miles on a full charge.

Cake is crushing its international orders lately. The Swedish electric motorbike maker has agreed to ship 1,500 bikes to Greece, 50,000 to Mexico, and 150,000 to China.

Dott, Lime, Superpedestrian, Tier and Voi have banded together to publish 10 recommendations for cities to better integrate their services. The recommendations aim to define the best environment for their services to function and how to regulate programs in a way that’s financially sustainable for them over the long term. Recommendations include suggestions on fleet sizes and vendor contract length, data sharing protocols, vendor fees, parking and more.

Eunora unveiled its Flash moped-style e-bike that can ride up to 220 miles on a single charge because it’s got a three-battery setup. That’s enough power to drive you from Boston to NYC.

India’s Hero MotoCorp is joining up with California startup Zero Motorcycles to develop premium e-motorbikes and powertrains.

New Mexico has a new bill in the works to give low-income residents up to $1,200 in discounts for electric bikes.

Almost every major scooter-sharing app, except for Voi, has seen a YoY rise in downloads. But downloads are not necessarily the best metric to gauge success in the sector. VCs plugged $5 billion into the industry, but none have seen returns on those hefty investments, and operators like Bird are actively pulling out of unprofitable cities and preparing to declare bankruptcy if they don’t raise more funds and get their houses in order.

The UK is slashing its active transportation budget by £200 million, which will make it nearly impossible for the country to reach its goal of 50% of all trips being by bike or foot by 2030. The cuts were made despite a recent Oxford study that found if 20% of car trips in Britain were taken by shared e-bikes or e-scooters, there would be a £1.1 billion boost to the economy.

Vässla is bringing its 42-pound, simplistic e-bike with a removable battery to NYC as a subscription service. It will also be available for purchase nationwide for $2,990.

Deal of the week

WeRide, a Chinese robotaxi developer that investors have poured more than $1.4 billion into, confidentially filed to go public in the United States with an aim to raise as much as $500 million.

WeRide is trying to commercialize autonomous vehicle technology via the robotaxi model — and at scale. But the technology is far from mature and investors aren’t as keen to fund late-stage expansion as they once were.

The siren song of the public markets — and all of the capital they can provide — is simply too loud for WeRide to ignore. It’s apparently attractive to the Chinese company even though it will likely face scrutiny from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS).

China has also stepped up regulatory oversight on overseas-listed firms that could post national security risks in cross-border data transfers. Ride-hailing giant Didi was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange amid pressure from Beijing. WeRide’s competitor, Pony, also put its plan to go public in the U.S. via SPAC with a $12 billion valuation on hold.

Is WeRide’s IPO a sign that tensions are easing slightly, or does the company have a rough ride ahead of it? I’m betting the latter.

Other deals that got my attention ….

Arrival secured a $300 million equity financing line from Westwood Capital to help it stay in business into late 2023, but no later — not unless it can raise more funds with fewer strings attached. The company has all but shut down its microfactory in Bicester, UK, and is redirecting resources to building a new factory in the U.S., where it can build XL delivery vans. To fund that program, the company hopes to raise up to $500 million.

BlaBlaCar plans to acquire Klaxit, a smaller French carpooling startup, in 2024. The proposed terms of the deal weren’t shared, but BlaBlaCar says Klaxit will complement its own commuting service called BlaBlaCar Daily once the acquisition closes.

Broom, an Indonesia-based auto-financing startup, closed a $10 million pre-Series A round led by Openspace Ventures. The startup will use the funds to expand its platform to help used car dealers work more efficiently by applying the asset-backed lending model to their businesses.

Ford, Gotion and Our Next Energy have been authorized by lawmakers to receive $585 million to put towards EV battery plants in Michigan.

Pull Systems, the first startup to come out of the UP.Labs-Porsche partnership, debuted at SXSW 2023 and announced it raised $5 million from UP.Partners.

Via acquired popular urban mapping app Citymapper. Rumors that Citymapper was looking for a buyer have been circulating for months, so the fruits of that have finally come to light. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Via confirmed it’s a mixture of cash and stock. Sources close to the deal tell TechCrunch that Citymapper investors are mostly not making money back in the transaction and it’s effectively a washout.

Notable reads and other tidbits

Autonomous vehicles

Cruise, the self-driving unit under GM, is rolling out its custom-built Origin robotaxi on Austin’s public streets in the next several weeks, CEO Kyle Vogt said while onstage at SXSW 2023. The Origin vehicles won’t be accessible to the public — at least for a while. For now, Cruise will be testing the Origins on public roads in Austin. But Cruise said the vehicles will be open to customers in a “matter of months.”

The first Origin vehicles are already rolling off the production line at GM’s Factory Zero in Detroit and Hamtramck, Michigan. (I took this picture of the Cruise Origin while in Austin and the interior looks a lot different from the prototype that debuted in 2020.

Image Credits: Kirsten Korosec

Gatik has signed a multi-year deal with Kroger to deliver customer orders within the company’s Dallas distribution network. Operations of the cold chain-capable 20 foot box trucks will commence in Q2 with a safety driver onboard to start.

Kodiak Robotics signed a deal for an ongoing partnership with Forward Air Corporation to operate autonomous freight 24/6 between Dallas and Atlanta.

TuSimple and drama seem to go hand in hand. We us summarize.

Earlier this week, TuSimple filed an 8-K saying that co-founder Xiaodi Hou had resigned from his position on the board before an internal investigation into him could be concluded. The investigation sought to verify claims that Hou was approaching TuSimple staffers about leaving the company and joining his new venture.

Recall that Hou had a brief stint as CEO last year before being fired from that post, as well as president and CTO, amid U.S. federal investigations into the company for its ties to Chinese hydrogen-powered trucking company Hydron. One of Hydron’s founders is Mo Chen, who is also a co-founder at TuSimple and remains on the company’s board.

Hou responded to this 8-K with a letter to TuSimple’s board, which was also posted on LinkedIn, defending himself. His two main points:

1) Hou didn’t agree with CEO Cheng Lu’s generous pay package, which was agreed upon by a suspiciously small board, days before TuSimple then cut 25% of its staff. Sources familiar with the matter worry that Lu’s severance package ($15 million if fired without cause or if there’s a change in control, like if someone buys the company) might not incentivize the CEO to keep TuSimple up and running in the long run.

2) Hou protested what he says is a shift in focus away from L4 autonomy and towards L2. Developing L2 ADAS for the Chinese market has been on TuSimple’s roadmap since 2022, but Hou says this shorter-term goal is being prioritized, and he’s worried L4 will continuously get pushed out.

TuSimple has since responded to this with yet another 8-K that includes a response from Chen. He accuses Hou for not being transparent about disagreements with the company. Chen also went on to deny TuSimple’s shift in focus and generally call Hou’s claims false, misleading and written with the intent to hurt the company.

Whew! OK, all caught up now?

Electric vehicles, batteries & charging

The Biden Administration provided more details on how the $2.5 billion Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) Discretionary Grant Program will be dispersed over the next five years. The grants will help to deploy tens of thousands of EV charging stations throughout the U.S., particularly in communities most vulnerable to climate change and air pollutants. The first round of funding will provide up to $700 million in FY2022 and FY2023.

BMW’s first Neue Klasse models will feature a head-up display called Panoramic Vision, which will go into production in 2025. Not many details were shared, but some hints were dropped earlier this year at CES.

Lightship finally showed off to the world — or at least those attending SXSW in Austin this week — a prototype of the L1, an all-electric RV designed to remove a barrier for owners of all-electric SUVs and trucks who want to haul a travel trailer on long road trips. I took a tour and took lots of photos!

Porsche will add a full-sized all-electric SUV to its lineup — slotting above several other upcoming EVs — as part of its goal for 80% of all new sales to be EVs by 2030.

Rivian is in discussions with Amazon to dissolve the exclusivity piece of their commercial EV van deal. Speaking of Rivian, the company’s chief engineer Charles Sanderson has returned to McLaren as CTO.

Tesla is being sued in a pair of proposed antitrust class actions that accuse the company of unlawfully curbing competition for maintenance and replacement parts for its vehicles, making owners pay more and wait longer for repair services.

In other Tesla news, CEO Elon Musk tweeted that version 11 of the company’s full self-driving technology will see a widespread rollout this weekend. Tesla has delayed v11 for months. And … California’s Civil Rights Department (CRD) must provide Tesla with the details of the investigation it conducted prior to suing the automaker for racial discrimination, a judge has ruled. The ruling might give Tesla the chance to narrow the scope of the lawsuit, which the CRD filed after hearing several reports that Tesla’s Fremont factory was a racially segregated workplace.

Volkswagen Group and its battery company PowerCo have picked Canada for its first overseas battery cell factory. The plant, located in St. Thomas, Ontario, will produce battery cells beginning in 2027, according to the German automaker.

Waze is adding a new feature that helps EV owners find compatible chargers en route. All they have to do is enter their vehicle model and plug type into the app. The app, which relies on crowdsourcing traffic and road data from users, also hopes to avoid outdated and unreliable information about chargers — many EV owners have the common problem of driving up to a charging station only to find that the plugs are busted.

Future of flight

Volocopter is working with Nepalese airline SITA to collaborate on IT infrastructure for vertiports.

Zipline unveiled its new electric autonomous drone platform for last-mile logistics, which includes: 1) An updated drone, the P2 Zip, with four propellers that allow for vertical takeoff and landing, as well as hovering; 2) a new autonomous “droid” to replace parachuting packages to the ground, and should provide more accurate drops; 3) charging and docking infrastructure that’s easy for businesses to set up.

Ride-hailing

Bolt is expanding to Nepal to launch its on-demand ride-hailing service in Kathmandu.

In a win for app-based gig economy companies like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and Instacart, a California appeals court on Monday reversed a lower-court ruling that found Proposition 22 to be illegal. That means those companies can continue to treat their drivers like independent contractors, rather than employees, in the state, dodging financial employer responsibilities like minimum wage, unemployment insurance, sick leave and other business expenses. The decision is expected to be appealed and may go up to the California Supreme Court.

Cruise Origin rolls into Austin, WeRide makes its IPO move and TuSimple stirs up more drama by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

March 13, 2023

EV SPACs hunt for cash, the SVB fallout continues and a new AV startup emerges

Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B.

It’s been quite a week. In 48 hours we saw the largest bank run in history with $42 billion withdrawn on March 9, leaving the bank with a negative cash balance of $958 million by the close of business that day. Regulators stepped in March 10 and took control.

TechCrunch has been deep into this story and will continue to be. You can find all of our coverage on the collapse of SVB here.

And yes, it absolutely has affected the the transportation sector, specifically the hundreds of startups within the sector. I spoke to some founders who had moved over most or all of their funds; there are others who were not as successful. And then there were a handful who never had their funds in SVB to begin with.

I’m here in Austin for SXSW and the SVB collapse is the talk of the town — well at least among the thousands who are here from the tech sector.

I will be here through Thursday to moderate a couple of panels and check out the all things mobility. A number of automakers (Porsche, VW, Mercedes-Benz), startups (where do I begin?) and execs (Cruise co-founder and CEO Kyle Vogt, GM CEO and Chair Mary Barra) are here this week. And I intend to meet up with as many of these folks as possible.

As for my panels: they are scheduled for March 14 and March 15.

The first panel, entitled “Can Collaborations Unlock the Future of Transportation?” will be held at 10 a.m. March 14 in the Austin Convention Center. The panel includes Christoph Acker, project manager of digitization and innovation at Porsche, Up.Labs president Katelyn Foley and Up.Partners co-founder and managing director Ben Marcus. I covered Up.Labs — an entity that’s structured like a venture lab with a new kind of financial investment vehicle — when it launched last June with Porsche as the inaugural partner.

We’ll dig into the Up.Labs origin story and get a progress report on its relationship with Porsche; we’ll also zoom out and get a state of the mobility industry, venture funding for startups and the challenges that automakers face to stay relevant in an increasingly tech-forward and software-defined world.

The second panel, “Welcoming Our Autonomous Overlords” (and no I had nothing to do with the title) will be held at 4 p.m. Wednesday, March 15 in the same room if you can believe it. Aurora co-founder and CPO Sterling Anderson, Rob Reich, an executive VP at Schneider, and Paccar VP and CTO John Rich will join me on stage to talk about trucks and e-commerce, autonomous vehicle tech and jobs. And yeah, probably a lot more. I have questions!

Have questions for the folks above? Want me to check something out while I’m in Austin? Email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com. You also can send a direct message to @kirstenkorosec

I hope to meet some readers during my stay. And if not, I will debrief y’all here next week.

Micromobbin’

Cooltra’s e-mopeds are now available to rent on the Cabify app in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia.

Check out the extremely Dutch Convercycle bike. It’s an e-cargo bike with an expandable rear that can be folded out completely with no tools and a single movement, creating a loading area for luggage behind the saddle.

Cowboy announced AdaptivePower, a new OTA update that will allow its C4 and C4 ST bikes to automatically change power settings depending on hill, wind and weight. The company also announced new funding at a lower valuation.

Helbiz says it has regained compliance with the Nasdaq’s trading requirements…but the company’s stock is still trading at $0.14.

Honda patented a new type of airbag for motorcycles that hugs a riders torso, rapidly detaches and inflates during a crash.

Lyft has ended its bikeshare service in Minneapolis.

The team at Micromobility Industries has put together a helpful database of all the known micromobility subsidies in the world to help consumers find financial assistance for their small EV.

Segway unveiled new scooters with a focus on safety features like turn signals and better braking.

Specialized Bicycles has launched a new utility e-bike line, Globe, starring the Haul ST cargo bike, priced at $2,700.

French startup Upway has launched its online marketplace that sells refurbished e-bikes in the U.S.

Xiaomi has unveiled its powerful new 4 Ultra e-scooter.

Uber has revealed some updates to its airport pickup features, including expanded Uber Reserve availability, step-by-step directions from a terminal to your driver, and walking ETAs.

Deal of the week

The past few weeks (ok, more like months) there has been a growing sense of … what’s the word? Ah, yes, “desperation” among some companies running low on capital. This hunt for cash is ramping up, particularly for the EV SPACs, which have high costs and in many cases no revenue yet.

Arrival, which went public in 2021 via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, posted preliminary fourth-quarter and full-year earnings reports this past week. The big message I got from the report was that the company was burning through cash and is hoping to secure more soon. Arrival plans to hold a business update March 13 so the company can “potentially finalize a transaction which, if consummated, would provide additional liquidity and further extend its runway.”

Then there is Faraday Future, which also reported earnings. This company, which somehow has managed to survive, said it is ready to start production of its FF 91 Futurist EV at the end of the month. That is, if it receives the remaining funds expected from investors and if suppliers are able to meet its requirements. And company execs indicated plans to raise another $50 million.

CEO Xuefeng Chen said during the company’s earnings call that he was confident the funds would be received. However, its fundraising days are not over. The company’s CFO indicated that Faraday Future is looking to raise at least another $50 million.

And then there is Rivian, which is not a SPAC but it is a publicly traded company that is spending lots and lots of money to ramp production of its R1T and R1S vehicles as well as its commercial van. The company said in a filing that it plans to raise $1.3 billion in cash via a sale of convertible notes. Now Rivian is certainly not in the same company as Arrival or Faraday Future. The company ended the year with $11.6 billion in cash and cash equivalents, which gives Rivian a runway of about two years at its current cash burn rate.

There is one other way to preserve cash. And that’s to cut costs. GM CEO and Chair Mary Barra is aiming to do exactly that.

In a letter to employees, Barra wrote that as part of the company’s plan to reduce structural costs by $2 billion over the next two years it was making buyout offers to 58,000 of its salaried “white collar” workers in the United States. This is a voluntary program. Let’s see how many take the offer.

A few other deals that got my attention …

ClearFlame Engine Technologies, a company that has developed a way for diesel engines to run renewable fuel, raised $30 million in Series B round led by Mercuria Energy Group. Existing investor Breakthrough Energy Ventures as well as new backers Rio Tinto and WIND Ventures, the strategic venture arm of Copec also participated.

Envisics, a U.K. startup that designs holographic in-car technology that projects navigation, safety alerts and other data on the inside of the windscreen, raised $50 million in funding from a number of strategic backers that includes Hyundai Mobis, InMotion Ventures (the investment arm of Jaguar Land Rover) and Stellantis.

Ghost Autonomy, the Silicon Valley based automated driving startup, raised about $45.3 million, according to a regulatory filing.

Itselectric, a Brooklyn-based EV curbside charging startup, raised $2.2 million in a pre-seed round led by Brooklyn Bridge Ventures. The Helm, XFactor, Graham & Walker, Clean Energy Venture Group and Pericles also participated.

Volta Trucks, the Swedish EV truck maker, is in advanced discussions to raise as much as 250 million euros ($263.58 million), Reuters reported.

Zero Nox, off-highway vehicle electrification company, plans to go public via merger with special purpose acquisition company The Growth for Good Acquisition Corporation. Upon closing, ZeroNox’s common stock is expected to trade on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol “ZNOX”.

Notable news and other tidbits

ADAS

Peer reviewed research from Noah Goodall, entitled “Normalizing crash risk of partially automated vehicles under sparse data” is worth a read.

Autonomous vehicles

Bryan Salesky and Pete Rander, the founders of the now-shuttered Argo AI, officially up to something. Bloomberg beat me to the story I was working on, but there is still a lot unknown, including who its backer(s) are. We do know this is an autonomous vehicle startup, likely related to trucking or logistics. I have heard who the primary backer is but have yet to verify the accuracy. Know something? Reach out to me.

Gatik founder and CEO Gautam Narang was interviewed as part of our ongoing founders series over at TC+.

Teleo, an AV company focused on heavy construction equipment, reached deals to provide 15 remote-operated wheel loaders, bulldozers, and dump trucks to construction customers John Aarts Group, Teichert and Tomahawk Construction.

Waymo added iHeart Radio to its robotaxis.

Earnings

Bird reported earnings and the results are well, interesting. Bird reported revenue of $69.7 million for the fourth quarter of 2022, a big improvement from the $49.5 million reported in the same quarter of 2021. However, that Q4 revenue included $28.8 million of unredeemed preloaded wallet balances collected over the past two years. That means revenue for Q4 is more like $40.9 million — a dip from prior periods. Rebecca Bellan does a deep dive into the earnings and interviews the CEO.

Lordstown reported earnings and welp! It’s not great. The company’s net loss widened to $102.3 million from $81.2 million a year earlier. And it only delivered three Endurance pickups to customers during the fourth quarter. The company did report that it had about $221.7 million in cash at the end of 2022.

Electric vehicles, batteries & charging

Mercedes-Benz said its new 2023 EQE SUV, which will be assembled at its factory in Alabama, will have a starting price of $77,900 and will arrive in U.S. dealerships in spring.

Tesla slashed prices of its Model S sedan and Model X SUV in the United States. Speaking of Tesla, federal safety regulators are investigating the company over concerns of steering wheels falling off 2023 Model Y vehicles. Oh but! The company did launch some fresh features on the Model S and Model X, including a new ultra red color, a high visibility glass roof and round (goodbye yoke) steering wheel.

EV SPACs hunt for cash, the SVB fallout continues and a new AV startup emerges by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

February 27, 2023

EV SPACs struggle, Mercedes shows its OS hand and Cruise passes the 1 million-mile mark

Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B.

This week, I headed to Sunnyvale, California, home to the Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America facility, to attend what the company had described as a strategy update. It’s safe to say the automaker packed a lot of news into the day-long affair.

Where do I begin? How about the future tech foundation of its vehicles. I’m talking about MB.OS, an operating system that Mercedes has been working on for years now. The operating system will debut in its next-generation of vehicles expected to go into production by mid decade.

Mercedes is not going it alone, however. MB.OS, which is designed to be more efficient and use fewer ECUs, will also leverage tech from partners like Google, Luminar and Nvidia.

Mercedes-Benz and Google announced a long-term partnership that appears to strike a Goldilocks-type balance between offering the Google services consumers want without ceding control over the entire operating system in the car. Specifically, Mercedes is tapping Google for its Maps, Cloud and the YouTube app.

Mercedes also announced plans to expand a rather new relationship with lidar company Luminar and provided an update on its partnership with Nvidia.

And the news didn’t stop there. The company revealed the interior of the upcoming Mercedes E Class, which includes the next-generation MBUX infotainment system that it described as a pre-cursor to MB.OS. The newly updated MBUX system will feature a “superscreen” that spans the entire dashboard and will feature a bunch of third-party apps including TikTok, Zoom video conferencing, Angry Birds, Vivaldi web browser and Webex by Cisco apps.

Drivers won’t have access to the apps while the vehicle is moving. However, it is expected that the automaker’s conditional automated driving system called Drive Pilot, which allows for hands off, eyes-off driving in certain conditions on highways, will make its way to the E Class when it goes on sale this fall. If that’s the case, well then, those apps would be available.

Last item: I sat in the passenger seat for a test “ride” of the Drive Pilot system on a highway in California. The hands-off, eyes-off system was impressive in terms of performance, staying within the lane, making automated lane changes and the style of driving (not too passive, not too aggressive).

Notably, though is HOW the vehicle communicates to the driver when it’s time to take over or if the driver is not following the rules. The driver-monitor system is on it! I can’t give a full review until I drive this myself, but my early impressions were positive.

You can drop us a note at tips@techcrunch.com. If you prefer to remain anonymous, click here to contact us, which includes SecureDrop (instructions here) and various encrypted messaging apps.

Micromobbin’

Apollo Scooters has teased the return of its Explore lineup. The new scooter looks like it has a folding foot deck that allows you to face forward while riding. Look out, Taur.

Arcimoto aims to ramp up 2023 deliveries and improve steering on its new 3-wheeled tiny EVs.

Bolt is adding an EV tricycle to its app in Malta. The tiny electric vehicle, Buzzz Electric’s Carver vehicle, has a range of 62 miles and can easily maneuver through Malta’s narrow city streets. It fits two passengers plus cargo, and protects passengers from the elements.

Defiant’s new electric skateboard looks like something off the sunny streets of San Diego, except it flies at 38 miles per hour.

The city of Delhi is clamping down on TNCs like Ola, Rapido and Uber operating motorbike taxi services without a permit. The city plans to enforce a 1988 law that makes it illegal to do so. Curious how Uber, in particular, will handle this. The company has a long history of saying “Screw you” to cities that demand it get a permit to operate there, arguing that Uber is not a taxi company, but rather a technology platform that connects drivers with riders.

Earth+Kin has launched the Mule, a fat-tired all-terrain wagon that can turn any bike into a cargo bike. The company had been campaigning on Kickstarter last year.

The European Parliament has tasked the European Commission with doubling the number of kilometers cycled in Europe by 2030. A new adopted resolution has a 17-point action plan to develop more cycling infrastructure as well as an ecosystem including bike, component and battery production and manufacturing.

The FDNY is urging the federal government to seriously regulate uncertified e-bikes after way too many fires caused by lithium batteries.

India’s Hero MotoCorp is gearing up to massively expand its EV lineup over the next 24 months.

Lectric has launched its XPedition, its first e-cargo bike. It has a 150 mile range, can handle 450 pounds of weight and can drive up to 75 miles on a single charge. The bike costs $1,399 for a single-battery setup and $1,699 for dual battery.

Lime reported that it reached full year 2022 profitability, in both adjusted and unadjusted EBITDA terms. The company told TechCrunch it’ll be free cash flow positive by this year or next, and is ready to go public whenever the markets become less stressed. Micromobility has been a tough business to get right, and many other companies have had to exit cities and shrink operations. Fingers crossed there’s hope for this industry yet.

London, Ontario received exactly zero proposals from a recent bikeshare RFP, probably because the city hasn’t put up any funds to keep the program going.

Mate has revealed its working prototype of an electric cargo bike. The Mate SUV wants to replace the family car. The bike isn’t cheap at about $6,900, but compared to the cost of car ownership of around $10,000 per year in the US, it’s a bargain. The Mate SUV will begin shipping to customers in the EU and UK in September.

River, an EV maker we featured back in October 2021, has launched its first electric scooter.

New Zealand’s Ubco has launched a 2023 special edition electric motorbike that’s designed to bridge the gap between city and offroad riding. It’s basically an upgraded version of the 2X2, complete with a host of cool accessories, like a built-in central tote, a compact rear duffle with expandable compartments, a phone mount and giant loop straps. It can carry 330 pounds, rides up to 30 miles per hour and a 75 mile range. Price is $6,999.

VoroMotors’s new RoadRunner Pro scooter lets you sit down while it carts you at up to 50 miles per hour. It’s a sturdy looking vehicle, and it’ll only set you back $2,895.

Youon Technology Co Ltd. showed off a folding hydrogen powered bike. Sure,why not!?

Are you a Barbie girl? Yvolution has the pastel pink e-scooter for you!

— Rebecca Bellan

Deal of the week

Welp, this week it’s just a roundup! Enjoy and see ya next time. ;D

Carmoola, the British-Ukrainian car finance startup, raised £103.5 million ($124 million) in a Series A round led by fintech investment fund QED Investors, to scale the business and increase staff headcount. The company also secured a debt facility of up to £95 million from NatWest.

Dida, the Chinese ride-hailing firm that should not be confused with Didi, refiled for an IPO. There were no details on the fundraising size or timeline in the preliminary prospectus.

Electra Vehicles, a Boston-based battery management software company, raised $21 million in a funding round led by Italian venture capital firm United Ventures. Stellantis Ventures as well as existing investors LIFTT, Club degli Investitori and BlackBerry Limited also participated.

Gauge, an online auction for dealers to buy vehicles directly from consumers, raised $5.3 million in a seed round led by Maniv Mobility. Other investors including Proeza Ventures and FJ Labs also participated in the round.

GeoPura, the UK green hydrogen pioneer, raised £36 million ($43 million) investment in a round led by GM Ventures, the investment arm of General Motors, and co-led by Barclays Sustainable Impact Capital with participation from SWEN CP and Siemens Energy Ventures to scale its green hydrogen business.

inDrive, the ride-hailing app founded in Russia and now based in California, raised $150 million in a debt funding round from General Catalyst.

Kou Mobility Group, the Estonian parent company of Comodule, Aike and Tuul, acquired a majority stake in e-bike company Ampler. Kou hopes it’ll be able to generate €1B in revenue by 2031.

Third Wave Automation, a high-reach autonomous forklift company, secured a strategic investment from Qualcomm Ventures and Zebra Technologies, bringing its total funding to $70 million.

Notable news and other tidbits

ADAS

Tesla started rolling out version 11 of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta software to employees and testers after months of delays. While the company hasn’t officially shared release notes on FSD Beta V11.3, leaked notes and videos from beta testers have surfaced online. Here’s rundown of what is included.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has asked Tesla to provide more information after one of its vehicles crashed into a fire truck in California. The agency did not confirm to TechCrunch what kind of information it is seeking, but NHTSA likely wants to determine whether one of Tesla’s advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) — Autopilot or Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta — was engaged at the time of the crash.

Autonomous vehicles

Cruise hit 1 million “driverless” miles 15 months after its first ride without a human safety operator behind the wheel on San Francisco’s public roads.

Motional is moving one step closer to its goal of removing the safety driver from robotaxi operations by expanding its service in Las Vegas to nighttime rides. Motional is working towards a fully driverless service later this year.

Earnings

Earnings season continues with Bird, Carvana, Joby Aviation, Lucid Group, Nikola and Stellantis posting full-year and Q4 reports. Next week, is Rivian!

The big takeaway, in terms of trends, is that EV SPACs are still struggling and the headwinds don’t seem to be abating. Lordstown, an EV SPAC that hasn’t report earnings yet, had bad news too. The company halted production and deliveries of its all-electric Endurance pickup because of performance and quality issues with certain components. The company is voluntarily recalling the 19 vehicles it has delivered to date because of “specific electrical connection issue that could result in a loss of propulsion while driving.” (gulp!)

Earnings highlights ….

Carvana has the distinction of losing $37 billion in market capitalization in the past year. And that’s not the bad news. The company reported a loss of $806 million in the fourth quarter, has forecast another drop in the first quarter and is facing rising interest payments.

Joby Aviation closed out 2022 with $1.1 billion in cash and short-term investments, including an upfront equity investment of $60 million from Delta. The company spent $291 million in 2022 and $84 million in the fourth quarter on operating activities and purchases of property and equipment. The company’s net loss of $66.9 million reflected operating expenses of $101.4 million.

Lucid Motors missed Wall Street estimates for fourth-quarter and full-year 2022 revenue, as well as 2023 production and delivery goals. As you might expect, shares dove. Lucid set 2023 annual production targets of 10,000 to 14,000, which is roughly half of the 20,000 to 22,000 deliveries analysts had expected for the year.

Nikola missed Wall Street expectations on revenue as the company failed to deliver enough trucks to bring in that sweet sweet cash. The company produced 133 battery-electric trucks in the fourth quarter and only delivered 20 to dealers. Nikola lost $222.1 million in the fourth quarter up from the $159.4 million it lost in the same period last year.

Stellantis, which includes brands Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Jeep and Ram, had a helluva of a 2022. Net profits popped 26% to to 16.8 billion euros ($17.8 billion). Revenue increased 18% to 179.6 billion euros ($190 billion). The company had particularly strong growth in North America, where revenue rose 23% to 85.5 billion euros ($90 billion).

Electric vehicles, batteries & charging

Dongfeng Honda will not launch any new ICE vehicles in China, starting 2030, the company told TechCrunch.

Electrify America said that beginning March 6, 2023, the EV charging company will increase its per-kilowatt-hour (kWh) and per-minute pricing. Pass members will see the price per-kWh increase from $0.43 to $0.48. The price per-minute will increase from $0.16 to $0.19 for up to 90 kW, or $0.32 to $0.37 for up to 350 kW.

Ford extended a production shutdown of its all-electric Ford Lightning pickup truck by another week.

Sono Motors ended its Sion EV program to pivot to a business that aims to sell its solar vehicle technology to other companies. The company laid off 300 workers as a result of the change.

Panasonic shares what it learned ramping up production that the massive EV battery plant operated with Tesla. An interesting read from WSJ.

Tesla is making California the home of its global engineering headquarters. The company headquarters will remain in Texas. Side note: Gov. Gavin Newsom and Elon Musk spoke at the announcement event, which is how we now know that the governor put $100,000 down back in 2007 to reserve the Roadster.

Future of flight

Blade completed a live test flight marking the first demonstration of a piloted electric vertical aircraft in the greater New York City region. The aircraft, known as “ALIA-250,” is powered by an all-electric propulsion system with vertical takeoff and landing capability and a noise profile that is 1/10th the sound decibel level of conventional helicopters, making it ideal for use in urban areas, according to the company.

Dozens of bipartisan members of Congress have come together to urge Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg to issue stronger leadership in the Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) sector.

In-car tech

Baidu revealed its much-anticipated intelligent Ernie Bot, widely seen as the search giant’s counterpart to ChatGPT, will make its way into in-car entertainment, among other applications.

Jaguar Land Rover will open three new engineering hubs in Europe, specifically Germany, Italy and Spain, to develop autonomous vehicle technologies. The new technology hubs are part of strategic partnership with Nvidia. The company already has six JLR tech hubs in USA, Hungary, Ireland, UK, China and India.

People

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said Tesla CEO Elon Musk still needs to get pre-approval from lawyers (aka Twitter sitter) before tweeting Tesla-related information.

Ride-hailing

Uber released an updated version of its app with a more straightforward homescreen that removes the friction of a few extra taps when booking a ride or ordering a delivery. It also allows customers to more easily access saved locations, and some iPhone users can track a ride’s progress on their lock screen.

EV SPACs struggle, Mercedes shows its OS hand and Cruise passes the 1 million-mile mark by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

February 27, 2023

EV SPACs struggle, Mercedes shows its OS hand and Cruise passes the 1 million-mile mark

Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B.

Mercedes is not going it alone, however. MB.OS, which is designed to be more efficient and use fewer ECUs, will also leverage tech from partners like Google, Luminar and Nvidia.

Mercedes also announced plans to expand a rather new relationship with lidar company Luminar and provided an update on its partnership with Nvidia.

Micromobbin’

Apollo Scooters has teased the return of its Explore lineup. The new scooter looks like it has a folding foot deck that allows you to face forward while riding. Look out, Taur.

Arcimoto aims to ramp up 2023 deliveries and improve steering on its new 3-wheeled tiny EVs.

Defiant’s new electric skateboard looks like something off the sunny streets of San Diego, except it flies at 38 miles per hour.

Earth+Kin has launched the Mule, a fat-tired all-terrain wagon that can turn any bike into a cargo bike. The company had been campaigning on Kickstarter last year.

The FDNY is urging the federal government to seriously regulate uncertified e-bikes after way too many fires caused by lithium batteries.

India’s Hero MotoCorp is gearing up to massively expand its EV lineup over the next 24 months.

London, Ontario received exactly zero proposals from a recent bikeshare RFP, probably because the city hasn’t put up any funds to keep the program going.

River, an EV maker we featured back in October 2021, has launched its first electric scooter.

VoroMotors’s new RoadRunner Pro scooter lets you sit down while it carts you at up to 50 miles per hour. It’s a sturdy looking vehicle, and it’ll only set you back $2,895.

Youon Technology Co Ltd. showed off a folding hydrogen powered bike. Sure,why not!?

Are you a Barbie girl? Yvolution has the pastel pink e-scooter for you!

— Rebecca Bellan

Deal of the week

Welp, this week it’s just a roundup! Enjoy and see ya next time. ;D

Dida, the Chinese ride-hailing firm that should not be confused with Didi, refiled for an IPO. There were no details on the fundraising size or timeline in the preliminary prospectus.

inDrive, the ride-hailing app founded in Russia and now based in California, raised $150 million in a debt funding round from General Catalyst.

Kou Mobility Group, the Estonian parent company of Comodule, Aike and Tuul, acquired a majority stake in e-bike company Ampler. Kou hopes it’ll be able to generate €1B in revenue by 2031.

Third Wave Automation, a high-reach autonomous forklift company, secured a strategic investment from Qualcomm Ventures and Zebra Technologies, bringing its total funding to $70 million.

Notable news and other tidbits

ADAS

Autonomous vehicles

Cruise hit 1 million “driverless” miles 15 months after its first ride without a human safety operator behind the wheel on San Francisco’s public roads.

Earnings

Earnings season continues with Bird, Carvana, Joby Aviation, Lucid Group, Nikola and Stellantis posting full-year and Q4 reports. Next week, is Rivian!

Earnings highlights ….

Electric vehicles, batteries & charging

Dongfeng Honda will not launch any new ICE vehicles in China, starting 2030, the company told TechCrunch.

Ford extended a production shutdown of its all-electric Ford Lightning pickup truck by another week.

Sono Motors ended its Sion EV program to pivot to a business that aims to sell its solar vehicle technology to other companies. The company laid off 300 workers as a result of the change.

Panasonic shares what it learned ramping up production that the massive EV battery plant operated with Tesla. An interesting read from WSJ.

Future of flight

Dozens of bipartisan members of Congress have come together to urge Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg to issue stronger leadership in the Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) sector.

In-car tech

Baidu revealed its much-anticipated intelligent Ernie Bot, widely seen as the search giant’s counterpart to ChatGPT, will make its way into in-car entertainment, among other applications.

People

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said Tesla CEO Elon Musk still needs to get pre-approval from lawyers (aka Twitter sitter) before tweeting Tesla-related information.

Ride-hailing

EV SPACs struggle, Mercedes shows its OS hand and Cruise passes the 1 million-mile mark by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

February 20, 2023

Tesla battles with union organizers, Zoox hits the road and Zeekr scores more capital

Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B.

EV charging has improved over the years, but it’s still unable to support the number of electric vehicles the Biden Administration wants to see on the road in the next few years. The administration’s $7.5 billion EV charging initiative is supposed to help solve that problem. And now, we finally have clarity around what it will take for companies to access those funds.

The Biden administration laid out the final standards for its plan to build a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle chargers along highways, including a requirement that all EV chargers funded through the Inflation Reduction Act must be built in the United States. Specifically, the final assembly and all manufacturing processes for any iron or steel charger enclosures or housing must occur in the United States. And by July 2024, at least 55% of the cost of all components will need to be manufactured domestically, as well.

All chargers are also required to use a standardized payment system that is smartphone-friendly and all connectors must use the “combined charging system” (CCS), which dominates in the U.S.

Will this be enough to solve the U.S. EV infrastructure problem? Or does the plan miss some critical points? Let me know what you think and I’ll share it in the next newsletter.

OK, let’s dive into the rest of the news of the week.

Micromobbin

Brexit has cost Ride & Glide, a micromobility retailer in the UK, $200,000 per year.

Cowboy says it will be profitable by this summer. The company hit $45 million in revenue last year.

E-bike incentives lead to more bikers, which makes biking safer, which creates more bikers, which makes biking safer …

Electra Bicycle Co. has launched the Loft Go! 7D EQ e-bike. The city cruiser comes in either step-through or step-over frame and costs $2000. Probably the coolest thing about the bike is it doesn’t even look like an e-bike. The 250 kWh battery is completely integrated and has a 40 mile range.

Geely’s Panda Mini, a very cute, affordable mini EV, might be sold in Europe soon.

MIT Media Lab is working on a self-driving tricycle that can be summoned on demand. A cool project, but the similar efforts of Tortoise and its three-wheeled ghost scooter have taught us that this will be a hard sell.

There’s a petition circulating in New Zealand that aims to convince the government to offer a rebate for e-bikes. Is it a good idea? Obviously, says the woman huffing and puffing up Auckland’s many hills on a pushbike. Will it happen? Maybe if the current Labour-led government moves quickly before the October elections. But when do politicians ever move quickly?

Porsche is renaming the Croatian e-bike company it bought in 2021 from Greyp to Porsche eBike Performance. Maybe new bikes will follow.

— Rebecca Bellan

Deal of the week

Zeekr sure has managed to make some big moves in its short life.

The two-year-old luxury EV brand under China’s largest private carmaker Geely, raised $750 million in its Series A funding round. And wait for it … the company’s post-money valuation is now $13 billion.

Wow.

And lest you forget, the news comes just two months after Zeekr said it had confidentially filed for an initial public offering in the U.S. We’re not sure what this fresh injection of cash means for its IPO. We’ve reached out to Zeekr and will provide an update.

Other deals that got my attention …

Cazoo Group, UK-based online car retailer, agreed to sell Cluno, its German subscription business, to ViveLaCar GmbH and The Platform Group GmbH & Co. The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, the total portfolio includes several thousand cars in the German market, according to the company.

ChargerHelp!, a Los Angeles startup that launched on-demand repair app for EV charging, raised $17.5 million in Series A funding led by Blue Bear Capital. Aligned Climate Capital, Exelon Corporation, and previous investors Energy Impact Partners and non sibi ventures also participated. ChargerHelp raised $2.75 million in 2021.

Side note: ChargerHelp! was also highlighted by the Biden Administration in its EV charging plan announcement that I wrote about earlier. ChargerHelp and SAE International’s Sustainable Mobility Solutions formed a partnership to assist in training the next-generation of essential workers who are certified as electric vehicle service equipment maintenance technicians (EVSE). Within the next two years, the EVSE Field Technician Program will help more than 3,000 trainees from low-income, disadvantaged, typically underrepresented communities, and those transitioning from other industries reach these jobs.

Cylib, the German battery recycling startup, raised €11.6 million ($12.6 million) to build a factory. World Fund led the round with existing investors Vsquared Ventures and Speedinvest also participating. 10x Founders also joined.

Dance, the micro-EV subscription startup created by former SoundCloud and Jimdo founder, raised an additional €12 million ($12.8M) in an equity and debt round led by existing investors HV Capital, Eurazeo and BlueYard. The subscription launched in Berlin and has since expanded to Paris, Hamburg, Munich and Vienna.

Dronamics, an autonomous cargo drone startup based in London, raised $40 million in a pre-seed Series A round that includes investors from Founders Factory, Speedinvest, Eleven Capital and the Strategic Development Fund, the investment arm of the Tawazun Council, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Hesai, the Chinese lidar company, raised $190 million from its public offering on Nasdaq. TechCrunch’s Rita Liao shares the company’s long and winding road to IPO.

Honeycomb Battery Co., an advanced battery technology subsidiary of Global Graphene Group, plans to go public via a merger agreement with special purpose acquisition company Nubia Brand International Corp. The combined entity plans to be listed on the Nasdaq exchange.

Ouster and Velodyne officially merged. TechCrunch interviewed CEO Angus Pacala, who says the next phase of growth isn’t self-driving cars or even advanced driver assistance systems; it’s smart infrastructure.

OpenEyes, an insurtech startup focused on commercial automotive fleets, made its public debut and announced it raised $18 million in Series A funding round. Software investor Insight Partners and Pitango First led the round with participation by MoreVC. To date, OpenEyes has raised $23 million.

Simple Energy raised $20 million to ramp up production of its electric moped in India.

Spiffy, an on-demand car care, technology and services company, raised $30 million in a Series C round led by Edison Partners, with participation from existing investors Tribeca Venture Partners, Bull City Venture Partners, IDEA Fund Partners, Trog Hawley Capital, Attinger and Private Access Network. Strategic investors Shell Ventures, Goodyear Ventures, and Mann+Hummel also participated.

Via, the on-demand shuttle service and transit tech company, raised another $110 million, bringing the company’s total funding to around $1 billion. The fresh capital pushes Via’s valuation up to $3.5 billion at the same price per share as the company’s previous financing in November of 2021.

VivaCity, a traffic sensor and data company, raised $8.5 million in a funding round led by sustainable infrastructure VC investor EnBW New Ventures (ENV), sustainability-led alternative assets and SME investment manager Foresight Group and Gresham House Ventures, the growth equity arm of specialist alternative asset manager Gresham House.

Notable news and other tidbits

Autonomous vehicles

The California Department of Motor Vehicles said companies with permits to test autonomous vehicles in the state reported their technologies drove more than 5.7 million miles during the latest reporting period (December 1, 2021-November 30, 2022). The data was shared as part of the required disengagement reports submitted to the DMV. Other fun facts: 5.1 million of those miles was with a safety driver and 622,257 miles were driverless testing. The total is an increase of more than 1 million miles from the previous reporting period.

Zoox has received a permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles that allows its custom-built robotaxis to operate on public roads. The Zoox robotaxi made its inaugural launch on public roads last weekend. For now, the robotaxi will only carry Zoox employees on a roughly 2-mile loop between the company’s two main offices in Foster City, California. (There are more permits to garner before Zoox can launch a commercial operation.)

The scope of Zoox’s launch on public roads is limited; however, it does mark another milestone for a company that launched quietly eight years ago with an ambitious goal to build and operate a commercial robotaxi service with its own purpose-built vehicle.

Electric vehicles, charging & batteries

Cadillac plans to reveal three more EVs this year that should enter production in 2024.

Chris-Craft, yes, the boat company, unveiled its first all-electric concept boat, the Launch 25 GTe, at the 2023 Miami International Boat Show.

The European Parliament formally approved a law to ban the sale of new gas and diesel cars in the European Union starting in 2035.

Ford plans to invest $3.5 billion to build a factory in Michigan that will make cheaper lithium iron phosphate batteries for its growing portfolio of electric vehicles. Ford will work with Chinese company Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., known as CATL. Under the arrangement, Ford’s wholly owned subsidiary would manufacture the battery cells using LFP battery cell knowledge and services provided by CATL. The arrangement has caught the attention of the Chinese government and U.S. Sen. Mark Rubio, who wants the Biden Administration to review the deal.

One of Ford’s nagging problems has been recalls and other inefficiencies that are cutting into its bottom line. Now, a new issue has popped up that could hurt its EV truck sales. Ford paused production and shipments of the F-150 Lightning due to a potential battery issue. That stoppage, which started at the beginning of last week, has been extended and could last a few weeks.

Pacific Gas and Electric Company is partnering with Angel Island Ferry to electrify what will be California’s first zero emission short-route ferry, starting in 2024.

Stellantis brand Ram has developed a mid-sized EV pickup truck concept and plans to show it off to dealers next month. Speaking of Ram, the brand revealed a pre-production version of its upcoming full-size electric truck in an ad that aired during the Super Bowl. The Ram 1500 Revolution is packed with screens and, surprisingly buttons and knobs, Matt Burns writes.

Subaru issued another recall for its battery electric Solterra crossover due to concerns that hub bolts on the wheels may loosen and cause it to detach.

Earnings

Yup, earnings season is still on. This week, it was Aurora and Gogoro. Next week, Lucid and Joby Aviation report earnings.

Aurora Innovation reiterated during its earnings call that it will have enough money to get through mid-2024; The company plans to launch commercial operations by the end of 2024, according to co-founder and CEO Chris Urmson. Aurora reported it ended the year with $1.1 billion in cash and short-term investments. Aurora also noted that it recognized the remaining $2 million in collaboration revenue through its agreement with Toyota, for a total of $68 million recognized from the deal in 2022.

Aurora’s operating expenses in Q4 were $156 million, $131 million of which was spent on R&D and the rest on SG&A. For the full year, Aurora’s operating expenses were $650 million in total, with $540 million spent on R&D, primarily comprised of personal costs, according to the company. Investors reacted favorably to Aurora’s earnings report, likely because guidance remained unchanged.

Gogoro took nearly a 10% hit to its stock price after it reported weak earnings for the fourth quarter. Gogoro made $95.5 million in revenue in Q4, which is down 20.8% YOY. The company blamed foreign exchange rates for this, saying that revenue would have been up an additional $12.4 million had rates remained constant with the average rate of Q4 2021. For the full year, Gogoro pulled revenue of $382.8 million, up 4.6% YOY.

The battery swapping company reported a fourth quarter net loss of $12.5 million and a full year net loss of $98.9 million. Gogoro ended 2022 with $236.1 million in cash. The company said it expects revenue for 2023 to land between $400 million and $450 million, an increase of 4.5% to 17.6% compared to 2022. Gogoro said it expects most of that revenue to come from its Taiwan market, despite heavy investment in other markets like India.

Future of flight

Joby Aviation has started final assembly on its “company-conforming” eVTOL, which is essentially a prototype that’s a couple steps away from the final version. Joby expects to begin flight testing for the aircraft in the first half of this year.

In-car tech

The National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration said Hyundai and Kia have developed theft deterrent software for more than 8 million of its vehicles that lack an immobilizer system, which has made them a target of thieves across the country. The software will be provided free of charge to vehicle owners.

People

Convoy, the Seattle-based digital freight network that connects truckers with shippers, is shuttering its Atlanta office and laying off workers as part of a restructuring. This is the third time in less than a year that Convoy has laid off workers.

The NYT featured Missy Cummings, a professor at George Mason University who specializes in autonomous systems and who spent a year at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Cummings wants to rein in how driver-assistance systems are used.

Rivian hired Michael Callahan as its chief legal officer. Callahan is joining Rivian from Stanford University, where he served as executive director of the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance and Professor of the Practice of Law.

Shoichiro Toyoda, the son of Toyota founder Kiichiro Toyoda and long-serving executive of the automaker, died of heart failure at the age of 97. Shoichiro Toyoda led the company through decades of growth and notably pioneered a new model for quality control in manufacturing and was responsible for Prius and the creation of its luxury brand Lexus.

Ride-hailing

Lyft finally started charging riders wait time fees in December, but drivers are complaining those fees aren’t making it into their wallets. At least, not yet.

Uber drivers in New Zealand will be pushing for better pay and working conditions through their first-ever collective agreement with the company.

Tesla

Tesla is one of those companies that never seems to have a quiet period. There is always something going on with the company, or its CEO Elon Musk. And this week was no different. The big three Tesla stories this week involve unions, Biden’s $7.5B EV charging initiative and a recall of its Full Self-Driving software.

We covered some of the Biden EV charging business up top. Tesla is a big part of that announcement because the company has agreed to open up a portion of its Supercharger and destination charger network to non-Tesla EVs. The company will make at least 7,500 chargers available for all EVs by the end of 2024, according to the White House. At least 3,500 of those will be 250 kW chargers located along highway corridors. All EV drivers will be able to access these stations using the Tesla app or website.

Notably, Tesla has also agreed to more than double its supercharger network. TechCrunch’s Tim de Chant weighs in (over at TC+) on what this might mean for the automaker.

Meanwhile, trouble is afoot at the company’s Buffalo, New York factory. A group of Tesla employees (known as Tesla Workers United) who work as data labelers on the Autopilot team at the Buffalo plant, announced plans to organize a union. A day later, the group filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board claiming that Tesla fired more than 30 employees who work at the factory in retaliation for union organizing.

And, unsurprisingly, Tesla clapped back and called the allegations false. The Tesla Workers United was not amused and held a press conference Saturday to discuss its ongoing union campaign and company’s response to their efforts, including the claims that their Twitter account has been shadowbanned.

This could get ugly.

Finally, we wrap up the Tesla section with a recall of the company’s “Full Self-Driving” software, an advanced driver-assistance system that federal safety regulators say could allow vehicles to act unsafe around intersections and cause crashes.

Tesla said the recall affects 362,758 vehicles equipped with the software (I guess we now know how many folks have FSD). Tesla will release an over-the-air software update, free of charge, to fix the issue.

I got lots of DMs and emails about how we shouldn’t call this a recall because it’s not a mechanical problem. An over-the-air software update should not be called a recall!, many of you exclaimed. That’s the accepted terminology used by both companies, so I’m not calling it anything different.

And, consider this: software is just as critical to a vehicle’s safe operations as its mechanical bits. It all matters!

Tesla battles with union organizers, Zoox hits the road and Zeekr scores more capital by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

February 6, 2023

Elon dodges liability, Ford falters and Rivian lays off more workers

Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B.

Elon Musk has successfully escaped one of his legal troubles. ICYMI: A jury found Musk was not liable in a class-action securities fraud trial that centered on the Tesla CEO’s now infamous “funding secured” tweet. The jury deliberated for less than 90 minutes.

The central question in the lawsuit was whether Musk was liable for losses suffered by shareholders after he posted in August 2018 several messages on Twitter that he had secured funding to take Tesla private.

I’ve received a few messages asking how the jury could end up here? Well, I’m not a lawyer, but I did talk to a few of them. Their answer was “it’s complicated.”

Many noted the following: It was a tough case to prove, the attorneys representing the plaintiffs didn’t do a great job on a shit sandwich of a case and the defense had some key points going for them. Several jurors interviewed after the verdict said the plaintiffs attorneys’ arguments were difficult to follow and sometimes seemed disorganized.

I found the closing arguments of Musk’s attorney Alex Spiro also hard to follow, what with the jumping around between sports analogies, time lines and the recreating of moments he didn’t witness. But there was a moment where I went, welp, that’s it. I’m paraphrasing, but he essentially told the jury, you can be done and home this afternoon if you make the right call.

The jury instructions were also incredibly complicated and included extensive math to determine the liability. The trial had been a mind-numbing three weeks of verbal tug-of-war. All of that combined into the end result.

OK, on to the rest of the news from last week!

Micromobbin’

Let’s talk about electric bikes. A new report has shown that e-bike subsidies are more effective than electric car subsidies at reducing CO2 emissions. While it takes a $1,000 subsidy to raise electric car demand by 2.6%, it will only take about $100 to do the same for e-bikes. So where are we when it comes to e-bike subsidies?

It’s a grassroots movement, for sure. Denver’s popular e-bike voucher scheme has recently relaunched. Oregon held its first legislative hearing for its $1,200+ e-bike subsidy this week. Hawaii is considering adding an additional $2,000 subsidy to its existing rebate for adults to help high schoolers do the same. Additionally, a newly introduced bill in the state legislature would allocate $2 million a year to fund bike and e-bike purchases for students. Outside the U.S., the island of Jersey in the U.K. plans to double the number of e-bike grants available following a successful pilot.

Meanwhile in New York City, a misguided council member has introduced a bill to ban all e-bikes and scooters after a series of battery fires. Wouldn’t it make more sense to invest in e-bikes so people could afford to buy higher quality ones that won’t burst into flames?

Is there hope that change can happen at the federal level? There are indeed flickers. The U.S.’s recently approved omnibus spending bill includes $26.7 million in funding for trail, bike and pedestrian projects in 29 states. It’s not massive, but we’ll take it.

If you think it’s time to make that micromobility purchase, check out this list of the best deals put together by Ride Review.

In other news…

Cake is reportedly planning its entry into the Indian market.

London has launched a new £110 million Scrappage Scheme ($132 million) that incentivizes residents to trade in their clunkers for e-bikes, e-scooters and public transit. The initiative was launched ahead of the expansion of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone. Londoners who scrap non-compliant vehicles can get up to £2,000 ($2,400) — or take a smaller cash grant and two free annual bus/tram travel passes. Small businesses can claim grants up to £9,500 ($11,400). Lime, Dott and Tier, London’s three e-scooter operators, are also offering discounted or free rides to successful applicants.

Lyft has launched a new dockable e-scooter, made in partnership with Segway-Ninebot, to address the chaos involved in the free-floating model. The company said it can retrofit existing bike docks that it has all over the country to scale the new scooters.

McKinsey & Co have a new study that projects the global shared micromobility market will generate up to $90 billion in 2030, which would be a 40% increase each year between 2019 and 2030.

SpaceCamper, a company that’s known for its VW bus conversions, has launched its first camper electric bike. The cargo bike can be equipped with a table, tent and other amenities for outdoor exploration.

TechCrunch reviewed the Superstrata, an e-bike that is custom 3D printed to order using a single piece of carbon fiber. One thing Superstrata wants you to know: It’s not an e-bike company. It’s an “advanced manufacturing company.”

Deal of the week

China’s Zhejiang Geely Holding Group has been busy! I recently wrote about its Zeekr brand. And now, there’s news about Lotus Technology, which Geely acquired in 2017 for $65 million.

This week, Lotus Technology agreed to go public via a merger with special purpose acquisition company L Catterton Asia Acquisition in a transaction that values the combined entity at about $5.4 billion. The company intends to be listed on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker LOT.

Lotus Tech, the technology arm of the sports car brand, is developing all-electric vehicles. It aims to compete with Porsche, Ferrari and Aston Martin for customers. Nearly a year ago, Lotus unveiled a battery-electric “hyper” SUV called the Eletre — the first of a trio of EVs Lotus plans to launch over the next four years.

Other deals that got my attention this week …

ABB E-Mobility, the EV charging division of ABB, sold a 12% stake for 325 million Swiss francs ($355 million) to four investors: Porsche AG holding company Porsche SE as well as BeyondNetZero, the climate solutions fund of General Atlantic, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and the UK-based investment firm Just Climate.

Atlas Technologies B.V., the operating company responsible for the production of the Lightyear EV, filed for bankruptcy. Lightyear had a substantial exhibit at CES 2023 and had just opened its waitlist for its mass-market EV, the Lightyear 2.

Britishvolt attracted Greybull Capital as a late bidder for the bankrupt UK-based battery maker.

Cheche Technology, a Beijing-based auto insurance search engine, agreed to go public via a merger with special purpose acquisition company Prime Impact Acquisition I at an implied enterprise valuation of $841 million.

Hesai Group, a Chinese lidar company, set the terms of its IPO to 9 million shares priced between $17 and $19.

Fleetcor Technologies acquired Mina, a cloud-based EV charging software platform.

Navya, the France-based autonomous vehicle company, said it doesn’t have sufficient capital to meet its current liabilities and has requested the opening of receivership proceedings.

Onto raised a £100 million ($120 million) credit facility from global investment group CDPQ and independent asset manager Pollen Street to expand its UK fleet of electric cars for subscription.

Our Next Energy, a buzzy battery startup, closed a $300 million Series B round in an effort to get its $1.6 billion gigafactory up and running. The new round, led by Fifth Wall and Franklin Templeton, values the company at $1.2 billion post-money. Other investors included Temasek, Riverstone Holdings, Coatue, AI Capital Partners, Sente Ventures and insiders Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Assembly Ventures, BMW i Ventures and Volta Energy Technologies. Also joining the round are two unnamed strategic investors, “a manufacturer of EV technology solutions and a renewable energy provider,” the company said.

Phantom AI raised $36.5 million in a Series C funding round led by Intervest, a South Korean venture fund. South Korean investment bank Shinhan GIB and Samsung’s venture arm also participated.

Tau, an Italy-based supplier of winding wire for EVs, raised €9 million ($9.7 million) in a Series B funding round led by Solvay Ventures. Finindus, a Belgium-based joint venture of ArcelorMittal and the Flemish Region, also participated.

Notable reads and other tidbits

ADAS

The U.S. Department of Justice has asked Tesla for documents related to its branded Full Self-Driving and Autopilot advanced driver-assistance systems, the automaker disclosed in a securities filing.

Autonomous vehicles

Cruise received approval from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to test its custom-built Origin vehicle on public roads. Meanwhile, city officials are trying to pressure regulators to slow down the deployment of Cruise and Waymo robotaxis in San Francisco.

A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles would cause a major increase carbon emissions due to the onboard computing power needed to run them.

TuSimple is facing even greater federal scrutiny. The WSJ reported (based on unnamed sources) that representatives of the U.S. national-security panel have urged the Justice Department to consider economic-espionage charges against leaders of TuSimple.

Earnings

GM and Ford earnings dropped this week and they couldn’t have been more different. GM printed money, and importantly, seems to have kept costs in check and shored up its supply chain. GM has taken its supply chain efforts all the way to mining. The company said in its Q4 earnings that it invested $650 million into Lithium Americas as part of an agreement to develop a mine in Nevada.

Meanwhile, Ford CEO Jim Farley said the company left about $2 billion in profits on the table in 2022. The company earned $10.4 billion in net income (on adjusted basis) last year, falling well below its own guidance and missing Wall Street’s expectations.

The causes? Well, there were a few costly expenses that also put a dent in Ford’s bottom line, including a $7.3 billion writedown on its Rivian investment and another $2.8 billion for its investment in Argo AI. But the real culprits were (and are), that the company is spending way too much on materials, shipping costs and production, inferior quality that has led to too many recalls and inefficiencies throughout its operations.

While Ford is optimistic that it now has the right plan in place to fix this mess, it did warn of headwinds including pressure to lower prices. And guess what? Yup, Ford is already lowering prices. The company announced last week it had increased production and cut the price of its all-electric Mustang Mach-E crossover, the latest automaker to join an EV price war started by Tesla.

Tesla reported earnings last week, but its 10K dropped a few days later and contained some interesting bits. We noted the DOJ investigation above. The 10K also disclosed that Tesla recorded a $204 million impairment loss in 2022 on its bitcoin holdings. The loss was offset by $64 million in profits from bitcoin trading, leaving the automaker with a net loss of $140 million.

Electric vehicles, charging & batteries

Bollinger Motors filed a lawsuit against Munro Vehicles, and its head designer, over alleged breach of contract, patent infringement and trade dress infringement.

BMW said it will invest 800 million euros ($866 million) to expand its operations at its factory in central Mexico to produce high-voltage batteries and its next-generation of electric vehicles known as Neue Klasse.

Nissan finally showed a physical version of the Nissan Max-Out EV convertible concept. Will it be an electrified GT-R successor?

Rivian is cutting 6% of its workforce for the second time in less than a year. When I interviewed founder and CEO RJ Scaringe on the Disrupt stage last October he said that of Rivian’s nearly 15,000 employees, about half were focused on future products, including people working on updated drive units and battery packs. Now, future products are important. But that figure seemed shocking to me (anyone else?) because the company had yet to master production of its three existing products.

The U.S. Treasury Department updated the vehicle classification standard, revising a definition that determines which EVs are eligible for clean vehicle tax credits. Vehicle models like the Cadillac Lyric, certain trims of the Ford Mustang Mach-E and the five-seater Tesla Model Y now qualify for the $7,500 EV tax credit.

People

AEye, the lidar company, hired Matt Fisch as CEO and as a member of its board.

Aurora Innovation hired Ossa Fisher as president as the autonomous vehicle company prepares to commercially launch its self-driving trucks business next year.

General Motors hired Zach Kirkman, the former head of Tesla’s corporate development, to a similar position. Kirkman’s title at GM is vice president of corporate development and global mergers and acquisitions.

Volvo Cars appointed Jeremy Offer as head of global design. Offer succeeds Robin Page, who will remain with Volvo Cars as senior advisor.

Ride-hailing

A proposed Colorado bill would require ride-hail companies like Uber and Lyft, as well as delivery services, show customers and drivers how much of the payment for a ride goes to the driver and how much to the company before the customer can give a tip.

Security

Hotai Motor, the Taiwanese automotive conglomerate, exposed reams of personal customer data from its car rental and carshare unit, iRent, until a security researcher found the data online last week. Even then, it took the company a week — and the intervention of the Taiwanese government — to act.

SPACs

Remember when all the SPAC news was about some big deal or an eye-popping stock-price jump? Well, now it seems that much of the news surrounding SPACs — when a company goes public by merging with a blank-check company — falls into the official “ruh-roh” category. So, I’m creating a new category for the occasion.

Arrival going through another restructuring — this time led by a newly appointed CEO — that will slash its workforce by about 50%. This is the commercial EV company’s third restructuring since July 2022.

Getaround, a peer-to-peer car-sharing company, had two bits of bad news. The company received a delisting warning from the New York Stock Exchange because its stock price has traded below $1 for the past 30 days. A day later, Getaround laid off about 10% of its staff.

Elon dodges liability, Ford falters and Rivian lays off more workers by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

January 30, 2023

Elon takes the stand, Akio Toyoda hands over the CEO keys and layoffs come for Waymo

Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B.

It seems we can’t get through a week without discussing something related to Tesla. The company announced a new investment in its Nevada gigafactory and shared Q4 earnings (more on that later). But much of the attention was directed at the class-action securities fraud trial that kicked off earlier this month in San Francisco. Tesla shareholders who traded the company’s stock in the days after CEO Elon Musk’s infamous 2018 tweet that stated funding was “secured” to take Tesla private at a potential value of $420 per share are suing the executive for billions of dollars in damages.

This week, lawyers on either side of the courtroom engaged in a verbal tug of war over the intent of Musk’s “funding secured” tweet — a question that they tried to answer during his testimony by picking apart emails, phone calls and boardroom conversations. The words ‘drudgery’ and ‘mind numbing’ came to mind more than once as the sparring over whether Musk knew he was being negligent was hashed out.

There were a couple of tidbits that came out of the whole debacle. Musk testified that his $420 per share reference was not a joke or a reference to weed culture, but rather it was a 20% premium over the stock price at the time. Sure, sure …

Musk also disclosed that he thought funding was secured from the Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, and that even if he didn’t, he would have sold SpaceX shares to fund the buyout, much like he sold Tesla shares to fund Twitter. Wonder why he didn’t share that five years ago?

Akio Toyoda at a press conference in 2021.

Perhaps the biggest automotive story of the week was Akio Toyoda’s surprise announcement that he is stepping out of the CEO driver seat at Toyota and handing the keys to Koji Sato, who most recently led automaker’s luxury brand Lexus.

Akio Toyoda isn’t leaving the Toyota altogether. He will now become chairman of the board, replacing Takeshi Uchiyamada, who held the position since 2013. The company has said the change to management was triggered by Uchiyamada’s resignation.

Toyoda and Sato made remarks during a live streamed Toyota event and a few nuggets stood out to me.

One was Toyoda commenting on his 13 years as CEO, an era when the company suffered due to the global financial crisis, earthquake and a worldwide recall.

I believe that in times of crisis, two paths appear before us. One is a path toward short-term success or a quick victory. The other is a path that leads back to the essential qualities and philosophies that gave us strength.

I chose the latter.

And Sato on the future:

I love making cars. For that reason, I want to be a president who continues to make cars. I would like to show what kind of company Toyota should be through our cars. That’s what I want to do.

Cars that are fun to drive and cars that support mobility. And cars in the future will evolve into the concept of mobility itself. Amid such, I hope to preserve the essential value of the car and propose new forms of mobility.

Micromobbin’

This was a pretty slow week in the micromobility realm, but there are a few morsels worth sharing.

Bike New York, a non-profit org, is providing immigrants and asylum seekers with two wheels.

California will soon be the latest state to offer rebates for e-bikes. The state is gearing up to launch up to $13 million in funding.

Citibike has raised membership and single trip prices in Jersey City and Hoboken. Will other markets follow?

Helbiz wants to address short selling of its stock. The company signed a deal with Shareholder Intelligence Services to stop any illegal short selling.

Honda Motorcycle is set to launch sit-down e-scooters in 2024 for the Indian market.

Madrid has selected Lime, Dott and Tier for scooter licenses. The permits are good for three years, which is a step up on many permits that only last a year or two.

Tier has announced more layoffs across its own brand and Spin. This follows previous rounds of layoffs from both companies. Tier said it would let go 80 workers from Tier and another 20 from Spin as it pivots its strategy from growth at all costs to sustainable growth.

Veo donated 36 decommissioned bikes to a Bronx school.

Deal of the week

There wasn’t one big deal that caught our attention this week, so here are a few smaller ones that you should know about.

Ampeco, a Bulgarian EV charging management platform, raised a $13 million Series A led by BMW iVentures to drive into North America.

Caura, an administrative app for drivers, raised £4 million ($5 million) from LLoyds Banking Group Plc. The four-year-old company is also backed by Jaguar Land Rover’s venture arm.

Geely is planning a big investment to turn London’s iconic black taxis into a high-volume, all-electric brand with a range of commercial and passenger vehicles.

Log9 Materials, an India-based battery tech startup, raised $40 million in Series B round of equity and debt co-led by Amara Raja Batteries and Petronas Ventures. Incred Financial Services, Unity Small Finance Bank, Oxyzo Financial Services and Western Capital Advisors also participated.

Onto raised a £100 million line of credit from CDPQ to continue expanding its UK fleet with the latest electric car models.

Sheeva.AI, a company that developed in-car payments and commerce platform based on a vehicle’s location, raised $9.25 million in a Series A funding round led by strategic Reynolds and Reynolds Company, with additional funding from Poppe + Potthoff Capital GmbH and Pegasus Tech Ventures.

Terra Drone raised a $14 million Series C from Wa’ed Ventures, the VC arm of Saudi Arabia’s public oil and gas company, Saudi Aramco.

Virgin Australia is expected to begin interviewing lead underwriters for a planned IPO in 2023.

Notable reads and other tidbits

ADAS

Tesla’s Autopilot fell in a Consumer Reports ranking of 12 major systems. Ford’s BlueCruise ranked the highest, followed by General Motors’ Cadillac Super Cruise and Mercedes-Benz Driver Assistance. Autopilot came in 7th place.

Autonomous vehicles

Vay received an exemption permit to test its remotely piloted cars on public roads in Germany.

Waymo quietly laid off staff as its parent company Alphabet let go of 12,000 workers.

Also missed this one last week. Waymo was named the official autonomous vehicle technology partner of Super Bowl LVII, which will be held in Phoenix this year. “There’s no bigger stage for our 24/7 ride-hailing service than transporting people from all over the globe to and from the airport and around downtown for the many exciting activities surrounding the Big Game,” Waymo’s chief product officer Saswat Panigrahi said in a statement.

Electric vehicles

Bluedot is a startup that offers a debit card for EV drivers, offering them rewards and discounts on EV charging and other auto-related services.

Honda will establish a division dedicated to developing EVs and other electrical products like storage and generation.

Lightyear has stopped production on its Lightyear 0, the company’s €250,000 flagship solar-powered EV. It will instead redirect its attention to its second production model, the Lightyear 2, which will come in at a modest €40,000.

Tesla reported Q4 and full year earnings this week. The company beat Wall Street estimates with $24.3 billion in the fourth quarter. Tesla also reached record deployments for its energy offerings. Separately, Tesla invested $3.6 billion into building two new facilities in Nevada: a 100 GWh battery cell factory and the company’s first high-volume Semi truck factory.

Toyota is partnering with Enel X Way to make the latter’s domestic and street charging services available to Toyota and Lexus drivers. Volta Trucks has announced first production orders of over 300 electric EVs and more than €85 million in associated revenue.

Ride-hail

Gig workers in India on platforms like Uber, Ola and Swiggy are facing blocked accounts and other backlash for speaking out and protesting over poor working conditions.

Lyft has introduced wait-time fees, or charges incurred if a Lyft driver has to wait for a rider upon pickup. Uber has had them since 2016. Lyft’s new fees kick in two minutes after on-time arrival for standard rides and five minutes after Black and Black XL.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the company is not planning any widespread job cuts. Here’s holding him to his word.

People

Canoo named Ken Manget as its CFO. Ramesh Murthy, who served as interim CFO, will continue in his role as senior vice president of finance and chief accounting officer.

Elon takes the stand, Akio Toyoda hands over the CEO keys and layoffs come for Waymo by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

January 23, 2023

Zeekr goes on a hiring spree, Tesla kicks off a price war and Hesai files for an IPO

Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B.

Before I jump into our regular news roundup, I wanted to bring your attention to Zeekr, the premium electric car brand owned by China’s Geely Holdings. You might recall that about a month ago, Zeekr filed confidentially for an initial public offering in the United States. Zeekr, which will spin out of Geely, reportedly aims to raise more than $1 billion and is seeking a valuation of more than $10 billion, according to initial reports by Reuters.

As the IPO process creeps forward, Zeekr is busy scaling up. And in a big way. Zeekr already employs some 4,500 people, according to the company. Now it’s aiming to add two-thirds more workers to its roster.

The company posted on Wechat this week that it is hiring 3,000 new workers at more than 30 cities around the world, including its R&D center in Ningbo and Shanghai in China and in Gothenburg, Sweden. It’s also opening an office in Silicon Valley, although it should be noted an exact location has yet to be decided.

Most of these posts are for R&D and engineering in areas like software, battery management, thermal management, electric/electronic architecture. A few hundreds are for sales network, according to the company.

Zeekr is not even two years old yet. Prepare to start hearing a lot more from this brand.

Last week, you may recall I wrote about how Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk had entered into a pressure cooker, of sorts.

That pressure continues to build as we get new insight into an infamous 2016 “Painted In Black” video that promoted Tesla’s claimed “self-driving” technology. A senior engineer testified that the video was faked and apparently Musk oversaw the direction of the video, even dictating the words that pop up at the start of the video saying the car is driving itself. The video has been criticized for years now, so for many this will come as no surprise and validates their stance.

Question is, can consumers or shareholders argue (in a court perhaps) that they were defrauded by a video that convinced them Tesla’s self-driving technology was more capable than it actually was?

Meanwhile, Tesla slashing its prices earlier this month appears to have kicked off a price war with rivals like China’s Xpeng reducing the cost of its EVs. Tesla has one weapon that other automakers lack: one of the highest profit margins in the biz.

Tesla earned $15,653 in gross profit per vehicle in the third quarter of 2022; that’s more than twice as much as Volkswagen Group, four times the comparable figure at Toyota and five times more than Ford Motor, according to a Reuters analysis.

Price wars don’t always work out. But high profit margins buy Tesla some time.

Oh and against that backdrop, a trial is underway in San Francisco to answer the question of whether Musk is a fraud or is just too careless with his words. Under the microscope was Musk’s notorious 2018 tweet that stated funding was “secured” to take Tesla private at a potential value of $420 per share. Tesla shareholders who traded the company’s stock in the days after Musk’s tweet are suing the executive for billions of dollars in damages.

Micromobbin’

The folks over at Micromobility Industries held their online Micromobility World event this week, with top speakers including Kara Swisher, Gabe Klein and Matthew Yglesias. I listened to Yglesias discuss how important land use reform is for micromobility adoption.

As communities grow and new housing is added, more cars will inevitably join the roads, which will exacerbate current traffic problems. Yglesias says new housing policy has to go hand in hand with transportation initiatives to offer solutions and make it easier for residents to bike or scoot to where they need to go.

“That just means taking geometry seriously and so, if everybody all the time is carting empty space with them wherever they go, we don’t fit and we become this very sort of pessimistic, zero-sum, oh-my-god-don’t-let-them-build kind of people, which is a bummer,” said Yglesias.

In other news…

Beyond (formerly Brooklyness), the Brooklyn-based e-scooter subscription and retail company, is shutting down. “We had a fantastic run, but ultimately, delays in the supply chain and the overall macroeconomic climate made it impossible for us to secure more funding to grow the business,” wrote founder Manuel Saez in an email blast.

Gogoro is working with the Indian state of Maharashtra to establish state-wide battery charging and swapping infrastructure as part of a deal valued at $2.5 billion.

Helbiz is leaving unprofitable markets by spring 2023, but is also actively seeking new markets to enter that might be more sustainable.

Didn’t know this was a thing, but apparently in Japan, e-scooter riders in Japan needed a driver’s license to ride the vehicles. Starting this July, riders on stand up e-scooters that have a max speed of 20 kph will no longer need a license, but they’ll need to comply with the same rules as cyclists.

Check out this podcast from The New Republic on the high cost of cheap e-bikes, where they discuss the fires caused by poorly made lithium batteries, the populations most at risk, the challenges of regulating e-bikes and the consequences of our on-demand culture.

Parisians are voting this weekend on whether they want to ban free-floating e-scooters or not. At stake in the short-term is the renewal of permits for Lime, Dott and Tier. But in the long-term, Paris’s decision might affect how other cities deal with shared e-scooters.

Ride1Up launched the Revv1 e-bike, a moped-style bike that can reach 20 mph on throttle or pedal assist. The bike starts at $1,899 for the front suspension version and $2,399 for the full-suspension model.

A Washington, D.C. council member has proposed a $400+ rebate for e-bikes.

Deal of the week

This didn’t a lot of press attention in the United States, but it should have. Hesai, a Chinese lidar company widely considered a lead supplier of the sensor, filed for a $100 million IPO and plans to list on the Nasdaq exchange.

Hesai has attracted a lot of venture capital in its lifetime, raising more than $500 million to date from strategic backers like Baidu, Xiaomi on-demand services giant Meituan and CPE, the private equity platform of Citic as well as VC firms GL Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Qiming Venture Partners.

I wrote about Hesai as part of a larger piece on the lidar industry and how there are still TOO MANY companies. The upshot? A lot of lidar companies will be sifted out in 2023; the following year will be a ‘make it or break it’ moment for those that remain.

While Hesai is in a leadership position today, that doesn’t mean it will remain there. And it’s not yet profitable. It should be noted that unlike many other lidar companies out there, Hesai is actually producing and shipping sensors and generates revenue. The company reported in a securities filing that it brought in $112 million in revenue in the first nine months of the year and had a net loss of $23 million during the same period.

Other deals that got my attention …

Black Sesame Technologies, a developer of AI chips and systems for vehicles, is considering a Hong Kong initial public offering, Bloomberg reported.

MacroFab, a cloud manufacturing platform for building electronics from prototype to high-scale production, raised $42 million in a round led by Foundry and joined by BMW i Ventures, as well as existing investors Edison Partners and ATX Venture Partners.

Outrider, a Golden, Colorado startup developing autonomous electric yard trucks, closed a $73 million Series C round led by FM Capital and attracted new investors Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and NVIDIA’s venture capital group, NVentures. Other new investors included B37 Ventures, Lineage Ventures, Presidio Ventures, the venture arm of Sumitomo Corporation and ROBO Global Ventures. Existing backers Koch Disruptive Technologies and New Enterprise Associates also participated.

Volta, the EV charging network operator, will be acquired by a U.S.-based subsidiary of oil company Shell for $169 million.

Waabi, the Toronto-based self-driving trucks startup, landed Volvo Group Venture Capital AB as a strategic investor. The companies didn’t disclose the amount invested, nor many other details about the deal. Waabi contends that having Volvo on board will both provide it with access to the automaker’s extensive industry network and help it explore opportunities for large-scale commercialization.

Notable reads and other tidbits

Autonomous vehicles

Aurora put out its forecast for the AV industry and among its top takeaways (this coming from the CFO) is this nugget: “Independent AV companies will be positioned to advance more quickly toward product deployment and profitability.”

Electric vehicles, charging & batteries

Blink Charging announced an exclusive agreement with Mitsubishi Motors North America to provide Bling chargers and installation service for all of the manufacturer’s dealerships.

Chevrolet unveiled its 2024 Corvette E-Ray, the first semi-electric version of the iconic sports car. The E-Ray has a small 6.2L V8 and an electric motor. It charges the battery through regenerative braking and when the vehicle is coasting.

EVgo launched EVgo ReNew, a maintenance program designed to make sure that when you finally find that public charging station you so desperately need, you’re not met with multiple broken charge ports.

Hertz is launching a public-private partnership initiative, Hertz Electrifies, in Denver to bring 5,200 rental EVs to the city, increase charging capacity at the airport and Hertz locations, support the installation of public EV chargers and more. The company is hoping to mirror this partnership model with other cities in the future.

Kate is a new micro EV car company that clearly was inspired by the mini Moke.

Revel is adding five new EV fast charging hubs to New York City, adding a total of 136 public charging stalls to the city’s landscape.

People

Joby Aviation appointed Lt. Gen. (ret) Scott Howell, former Commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), to the company’s Advisory Board.

Kodiak Robotics has named former USA Truck CEO James Reed as its chief operating officer.

TuSimple appointed independent board members James Lu and Wendy Hayes were appointed to serve on its government security committee after receiving a non-objection from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

Wisk Aero CEO Gary Gysin is retiring from his position. He is also leaving the board effective February 1, 2023. Dr. Brian Yutko will be the new CEO. Yutko was most recently vice president and chief engineer of sustainability and future mobility at Boeing.

Ride-hail

Didi has gotten approval from China to re-launch its ride-hailing service after an 18-month probe from the country’s cyberspace watchdog. The Cybersecurity Review Office was investigating whether Did’s cross-border data practices were secure before going public in the U.S.

Authorities in Tanzania have increased the fee that ride-hail companies like Uber and Bolt can charge drivers from 15% to 25%. Nice for the companies’ earnings, but bad news for the earnings of the drivers.

Uber has expanded an agreement with Hertz to get up to 25,000 EVs to ride-hail drivers in European capital cities by 2025. Separately, in its race to electrify, the company is also in talks with automakers to build EVs that sacrifice speed, and even a wheel or two, to drive down sticker price.

Zeekr goes on a hiring spree, Tesla kicks off a price war and Hesai files for an IPO by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

January 16, 2023

Tesla rolls into a pressure cooker, Paris mulls its scooter future, and the double SPAC arrives

Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B.

Let’s get right to it, shall we?

Top of mind for me this week is Tesla. I know, weird.

But really, it seems that pressure is coming from all sides these days. The company’s decision to slash prices has angered recent buyers (one only need to turn to Twitter to view the ire), shareholders are becoming more vocal about the lagging stock price (it fell more than 64% in the past year) and its facing mounting regulatory pressure over Autopilot and its so-called FSD software beta product that promises full self-driving. To be clear, Tesla vehicles are not self driving. The system is an advanced driver assistance product.

At any rate, these problems keep piling up. How much can the company take?

In the past, Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk have managed to wriggle free of criticism or concerns it was stagnating, often by showcasing a potential future product or hitting ambitious production and delivery goals.

But Tesla narrowly missed its own production and delivery guidance for the year, and Wall Street’s Q4 expectations. And shareholders, consumers and regulators seem to be tiring of this cycle. To me, this is just another indication that Tesla is starting to be viewed (and treated) more as a legacy automaker and not a whiz-bang upstart that can do no wrong.

Micromobbin’

Rebecca Bellan was out this past week, but I still wanted to share a couple of interesting micromobbin’ stories reported by yours truly and Romain Dillet, who hails from France.

First up is Romain’s article that takes a look at Paris and its looming scooter decision that could upend the micromobility industry there. I recommend you read the entire article. Here’s a small taste.

On March 23rd, the fate of the 15,000 colorful electric scooters that currently spill across the streets of Paris could drastically change as the French capital weighs up whether or not to renew licenses for the three scooter companies currently operating in the city.

Romain gets right to the implications, which stretch far beyond Paris.

And this isn’t just going to impact Dott, Tier and Uber-affiliated Lime — the three companies that have held those licenses since 2020. The decision will set a precedent for the many cities around the world that have also let scooters onto their streets. If things don’t go their way, a negative decision in Paris could have a chilling effect on micromobility startups globally.

Image Credits: Bugatti/Bytech

Next up is a more luxurious, high-performance scooter story. I’m talking about Bugatti, yes Bugatti, and its new electric scooter.

Bugatti, through a partnership with tech accessory company Bytech, launched a $1,200 electric scooter in 2022. The two companies paired up again for a second-generation scooter that is beefier, equipped with new features and colors, and has larger “self-repairing” tires.

The 2023 scooter is 10% larger than its predecessor and is equipped with a 36-volt/15.6Ah battery and an electric motor with a maximum output of 1,000 watts, according to the companies.

That battery and motor combo allows the scooter to handle up to an 18-degree incline, max speed of 22 miles per hour and can cover 35 miles on a single charge, according to the company. (That’s up from the 22-mile range in the previous model.)

No word yet on the pricing for this bigger second-generation model. Perhaps this is one of those “if you have to ask” moments. ;D

See ya next week!

Deal of the week

We’ve seen lots of SPACs the past two years. but what about a double SPAC? Yes, it has happened.

I’m talking about Wejo, the British automotive data exchange platform that went public in November 2021 after merging with special purpose acquisition company via Virtuoso Acquisition Corp at an implied $800 million valuation.

But what’s this? The company announced January 10 it has now agreed to merge with a SPAC created by private equity firm TKB Capital, in a deal that could raise up $100 million. And that’s money Wejo needs.

It seems that this latest SPAC is the buoy Wejo is using to keep it afloat. It’s not just that Wejo’s share price fell below $1 a share; the company is also burning through cash.

Wejo warned in November it had a $15 million cash balance, which would sustain the company for a “very short period of time.”

Wejo is about two years away from generating life-sustaining-nope-we’re-not-going-to-file-for-bankruptcy revenue. To add a little extra financial drama to the scenario, Wejo also owes Palantir millions of dollars, per an op-ed piece by Chris Bryant in Bloomberg.

This double SPAC is an odd one. I have this nagging feeling that some other failing SPACs will try this same tactic.

Other deals that got my attention this week …

Apollo Future Mobility Group agreed to buy Chinese electric vehicle maker WM Motor Holdings for $2.02 billion. The acquisition must still meet regulatory approvals.

Hystar, a green hydrogen startup based in Norway, raised $26 million in a Series B round co-led AP Ventures and Mitsubishi Corp. Other investors included Nippon Steel Trading, Belgium-based investment company Finindus, Hillhouse Investment, Trustbridge Partners, SINTEF Ventures and Firda.

Ottopia, an Israeli teleoperations company focused on the agriculture, construction, last-mile delivery, logistics and mobility industries, raised $14.5 million in its Series A funding round that attracted public transport giant ComfortDelGro as an investor. Other participants included AI Alliance Fund, MizMaa Ventures, IN Venture and Next Gear Ventures. T

Oxbotica, a startup out of England that develops software to power autonomous vehicles, raised $140 million in a Series C round that included investment from Japan’s Aioi Nissay Dowa Insurance Co. and corporate VC ENEOS Innovation Partners. Existing investors BGF, safety equipment group Halma, hospitality and recreation investor Hostplus, Kiko Ventures, the online shopping company Ocado Group, Tencent, Venture Science and automotive component maker ZF also participated.

Tianqi Lithium Corp. agreed to buy Australian lithium explorer Essential Metals Ltd in a A$136 million ($94 million) deal that is estimated to provide enough supply for around 10 million electric vehicles.

Notable reads and other tidbits

Autonomous vehicles

Aurora gives a progress report to FreightWaves.

What next for Pittsburgh’s autonomous vehicle scene?

ADAS

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is apparently “working really fast” on the Tesla Autopilot investigation it opened in August 2021. Speaking of pressure on Tesla, there may be even more coming after The Intercept published videos and photos of an eight-car pile-up on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge caused by a Tesla Model S. The driver claimed “Full Self-Driving” was active at the time of the crash.

Electric vehicles, batteries and charging

Lucid Group produced 7,180 of its luxury Air sedans in 2022, exceeding its previously lowered guidance for the year. Lucid adjusted its guidance last fall, stating it would produce 6,000 to 7,000 vehicles in 2022.

Nikola is officially moving its battery manufacturing from Cypress, California to its Coolidge, Arizona manufacturing facility. The move is expected to be completed early in the third quarter. Manufacturing will continue in Cypress through the second quarter.

Proterra produced its first commercial EV battery at its new factory in Greer, South Carolina. The company is calling the factory “Powered 1,” and believes it will be the largest battery manufacturing facility in the United States dedicated to electric commercial vehicles.

Tesla plans to invest about $770 million into an expansion of its factory near Austin that includes a die shop, a facility for battery cell testing and another to manufacture cathode and drive units. Tesla indicated it wants to build the new facilities this year.

Zeekr, the premium brand under Geely Holding Co., started serial production of its second model, an electric van called Zeekr 009.

People

Carvana, the online used car dealer, continues to struggle and it’s cutting workers as sales slow and it attempts to manage its $7 billion debt load.

Cruise has Nilka Thomas as its new chief human resources officer. Thomas, who most recently served in a similar position at Lyft, succeeds Arden Hoffman at Cruise. Thomas also spent 13 years at Google leading efforts focused on recruitment, D&I, employee engagement, HR governance and employee relations.

Hyzon Motors, the heavy-duty fuel cell electric vehicle supplier, appointed John Edgley as president of international operations.

Scale AI, the San Francisco–based company that uses software and people to label image, text, voice and video data for companies building machine learning algorithms, laid off 20% of its workforce. The company did not say how many people work at Scale AI. However, back in February 2022, the company told TechCrunch it employed about 450 people.

Tesla rolls into a pressure cooker, Paris mulls its scooter future, and the double SPAC arrives by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

January 9, 2023

In-car tech and EVs dominated CES 2023

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive the full edition of the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. This is a shorter version of The Station newsletter that is emailed to subscribers. Want all the deals, news roundups and commentary? Subscribe for free.

Happy New Year (a few days late) and welcome back to The Station! your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B.

I kicked off 2023 in the same fashion as I have for a better part of a decade: I went to Las Vegas for CES.

Every year, I get asked the same questions: what really excited you this year? what stood out? And what does that mean for the future?

A few CES 2023 takeaways.

• Lidar companies dominated the show floor in West Hall (where most of the automotive tech was located). Everywhere I turned there was another lidar company, including Hesai, Innovusion, Luminar and Ouster (to name a few). My lingering hot take: all of these companies cannot survive.

• For all the talk about advanced driver assistance systems, there was a lot of autonomous vehicle technology on display. However, the vibe was different. I didn’t get the same hype-y ROBOTAXIS WILL BE EVERYWHERE messaging. Instead, autonomous vehicle technology popped up in a lot of commercial and industrial applications.

• Autonomous people movers and delivery vehicles shaped like giant toasters are still a thing. Holon, Hyundai Mobis and Zoox are just a few of the companies that displayed these kinds of vehicles.

• EV charging and energy storage were sprinkled throughout the show from the crowded Eureka Park to North and West Halls at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Not to mention a few EV charging news announcements as well like Mercedes’ plan to launch a global charging network.

• The car cabin continues to evolve into a digital, connected experience that includes augmented reality and even virtual reality from companies such as Holoride. BMW reimagined the head-up display, Chrysler gave its vision for your future car cabin, suppliers like Bosch, Forvia and Harman showed off its in-car tech, and GM and Microsoft demoed a new video game called Dash Runner to showcase the kind of entertainment consumers might want to interact with while they’re waiting for their new EV to charge.

• EVs in every form. Stellantis had perhaps one of the splashiest press conferences with its reveal of the Peugeot concept and the Ram 1500 Revolution truck concept. But I found EVs in all forms, particularly bikes, motorcycles and three-wheelers as well as obscure small off roaders.

• A bit unrelated to transportation, but I was surprised about how much robotics I encountered over at Eureka Park, the exhibition area for thousands of startups.

Micromobbin’ at CES

Keeping on with the CES theme of this week’s newsletter, here’s a roundup of all the micromobility news and vehicles that were unveiled at the show this year:

It won’t technically get you from Point A to B, but Acer debuted a new desk-bike that powers your devices as you pedal.

AtmosGear came to play with some electric rollerblades, and they only cost $500.

Italian bike-maker Bianchi used Ansys simulation software to create more efficient e-bike designs. A 70% reduction in frame prototyping sped up time to market and reduced development costs for Bianchi’s E-Omnia e-bike.

Brightway, a micromobility tech company, launched its Navee V-series of electric scooters, the Navee e-bike and the Navee sharing scooter.

Cake launched the Åik utility bike, which starts at $6,470 and is expected to ship in May.

Davinci Motor showcased its futuristic DC100 electric motorcycle (and had a display where you could sit on them). It’s a chunky-looking thing, but the company says it can compete against the performance of 1,000 cc combustion-powered motorcycles, making it from 0 to 60 in three seconds and a top speed of 124 miles per hour.

GreenStreet EV debuted at CES with the first prototype of its 3-wheel electric Autocycle. The company plans to bring the little vehicle to market in 2024.

Heybike unveiled its folding e-bike made from a single piece of magnesium alloy.

Icoma unveiled the Tatamel Bike, a prototype for a folding bike that in classic Japanese style actually folds into a box that can be slipped under your desk at work. The exterior of the folded up moped can be customized in wood, fake grass or leather. It’s a cool concept, but probably will remain a concept.

MoonBikes showed off an electric snow bike. While this wasn’t a debut, it’s still cool. Prices start at $8,900 for the snow bike — removable batteries included. MoonBikes also launched its app at CES so riders can get real time data on their performance.

RCA, a consumer electronics brand most well-known for inventing the VCR, rode into the micromobility space at CES with new e-bikes and e-scooters designed to handle everything from commuting to off-roading.

Verge launched a new electric superbike, the Verge TS, which features an electric motor integrated into the back wheel, which the company says transfers power straight to the road. It also creates more space in the middle for the battery pack. It’s available for pre-order now at $26,900 with U.S. deliveries planned in late 2023.

Yadea, one of China’s biggest makers of electric two-wheelers, is making a push into the U.S. market. The manufacturer said it will begin launching a series of marketing campaigns and events geared at kickstarting the brand’s growth in the U.S., and will open stores in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and work with 100 other brand dealers, in the first half of 2023.

Other notable CES moments

Here is a handy overview of some of the announcements we covered and stuff we saw at CES 2023.

Autonomous vehicle tech

Goodyear and Gatik say tire tech will unlock autonomous driving in winter conditions.

Indy Autonomous Challenge returned to CES 2023 and the Las Vegas Speedway. I had the chance to check out some of the competing cars and watch one make its way around the track at night (and with the lights out). It was a neat demonstration to show what sensors, compute and software can accomplish. The autonomous racing team from mOve research groupo of Politecnico di Milano were the winners of this year’s competition.

Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua gave a talk on the company’s near and long-term vision. Advanced driver assistance systems were a focus, but Shashua spent considerable time talking about the path to automated driving, including how future consumer AVs will come to market at scale by using its driver assist system, Mobileye SuperVision.

Advanced driver assistance systems

I took a short ride with Comma.ai founder George Hotz (who recently fired himself again as CEO and claims he is now a marketing intern) for a ride in a Kia EV6 equipped with its Comma 3 dev kit, which runs on openpilot, an open source advanced driver assistance system. The Comma 3 device, now priced at $1,499, works on more than 200 models. The hardware, which mounts by the rearview mirror, has three HDR cameras, two that watch the road and one night-vision camera to see inside the car. It’s also equipped with cellular LTE, Wi-Fi, an IMU, high-precision GPS, and microphones.

Openpilot has continued to evolve and improve based on my personal experience. On this most recent drive at a location off the strip, the vehicle was able to recognize (and stop) for red lights, keep it centered in the lane, make assisted lane changes and keep a safe distance behind other cars and trucks. It was the smoothest ride I’ve had yet.

Electric vehicles, including eVTOLs

BMW revealed the i Vision Dee concept car, a four-door sedan came out onstage in a crisp white, but later morphed into a variety of colors and patterns to show off Dee’s E Ink technology.

Honda and Sony launch their new EV brand Afeela.

Stellantis debuted a futuristic (with a nod to the past) Peugeot Inception concept as well as the Ram 1500 Revolution EV truck concept. A production version of the truck is expected to be revealed later this year and come to market in 2024.

Stellantis also made a big eVTOL announcement. The automaker said it will mass produce electric aircraft for Archer in a $150 million deal.

Volkswagen unveiled the ID 7 outfitted with electroluminescent paint that lights up on command. But that wasn’t the most interesting part of this upcoming vehicle (magic paint not included).

In-car tech

Amazon Alexa-enabled cars are now able to ask Alexa to find the nearest public EV charging spot.

Chrysler shares what future car cabins might look like.

Google announced an HD version of its vehicle mapping solution that is an additional layer of data that’s served to a vehicle’s L2+ or L3 assisted-driving systems through Google Automotive Services. Volvo and Polestar will be among the first automakers to have Google HD mapping.

Google also rolled out new Android Auto features that make it easier for drivers to navigate, play podcasts and music, and communicate while on the go. The new user experience design update features a split-screen layout that displays directions, music and texts at the same time.

Hesai landed a a new design win with SAIC’s electric vehicle brand, Rising Auto (also known as “Feifan” in China). The new model of Rising Auto will carry Hesai’s long-range automotive lidar.

Holoride launches a new product to bring VR into any car. And we tested it.

Luminar founder and CEO Austin Russell provided an update on the company and how its acquisition of Civil Maps fits into its long-term vision.

Nvidia’s on-demand cloud gaming service, known as GeForce Now, is headed to select Hyundai, BYD and Polestar electric vehicles. Nvidia made a number of other announcements ahead of CES, including that a partnership with Foxconn and that Mercedes will use its Omniverse Enterprise software platform to design, plan and optimize its factories in the metaverse.

Stellantis launched a new business unit called Mobilisghts dedicated to turning all that vehicle data into marketable products — and revenue.

Sharing economy

Bosch rolled out a security dashcam and accompanying support service designed for rideshare drivers.

Free2move, the mobility service brand under automaker Stellantis, plans to expand its car sharing, rental and subscription services in the U.S.

In-car tech and EVs dominated CES 2023 by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch