Features
22 Dec 19

BMW/Daimler cut back joint carsharing offering

Less than one year after Daimler and BMW merged their mobility services and announced to jointly invest one billion dollars in these new services, the resulting carsharing arm announced it is shuttering in North America and in a large part of Europe.

First, a reminder. When Daimler and BMW merged their mobility services in what was to become the Your Now, they grouped their mobility services into these new companies:

  • Share Now: free-floating carsharing (formed from the merger of Daimler’s car2go and BMW’s DriveNow)
  • Free Now (from the merger of myTaxi, Hailo, Clever Taxi): taxi hailing app
  • Reach Now: Mobility-as-a-Service app
  • Park Now: parking services
  • Charge Now: charging solutions

Now, Share Now has announced it will discontinue services in North America altogether. In Europe, the company is pulling out of Brussels, Florence and London, citing two extremely complicated realities. From the company’s press release:

“The first being the volatile state of the global mobility landscape, and the second being the rising infrastructure complexities facing North American transportation today - such as a rapidly evolving competitive mobility landscape, the lack of necessary infrastructure to support new technology (including electric vehicle car share) and rising operating costs.”

With regards to Europe, Share Now commented: “Further, despite our best efforts and investments in Brussels, London and Florence over the years, we are unable to continue operations in a manner that’s sustainable for our business due to low adoption rates.”

Going forward, Share Now will continue operations in the remaining 18 European cities.

Earlier this year, GM ended it Maven carsharing service in eight North American cities and Chariot, a micro-transit service owned by Ford, also went out of business.

Image: Your Now

Authored by: Benjamin Uyttebroeck