The new joint venture by BMW and Daimler aims to deliver five aspects for urban mobility. The companies who have been competitors for a long time have invested a combined of 1 billion Euros to establish Reach Now, Charge Now, Free Now, Park Now and Share Now that will focus on multimodal travel, ride hailing, ticket-free parking and car sharing respectively.
This joint venture supersedes the short- term rental schemes, Car2Go and Drive Now from the car makers. Them combined had been providing 20,000 vehicles for use across 31 major cities globally.
With a span of 100,000 charging points across 25 countries, Charge now becomes single provider of electric vehicle chargers in the world.
On the other hand, Park Now serves around 30 million customers in 1100 cities across Europe and North America, while Free Now caters to 250,000 drivers and more than 21 million customers in Europe and Latin America.
A combined reach of 60 million customers is the claim from the five companies.
The move “will create solutions for tomorrow’s urban mobility: intelligent, seamlessly connected and available at the tap of a finer” said the BMW chairman Harald Krüger. “We believe this will improve quality of life in major cities” he added.
The BMW chairman explained why it made sense to partner with a traditional rival in a new field: “Everyone was looking at the other side and seeing strengths.”. He emphasized that the partnership” was not always easy. There were conflicts we both needed to solve”.
Krüger explained why partnering with a traditional rival in a new field made sense: “Everyone was looking at the other side and seeing strengths.” However, he emphasized that the partnership “was not always easy”, saying: “There were conflicts we both needed to solve.”
All five ‘Now’ companies will have their headquarters in Berlin, a home to many technology startups of Germany and they are expected to create around 1000 jobs worldwide.
Source: http://bit.ly/BMWDaimlerJoint e
