Daimler AG and the BMW Group have gotten the go-ahead from U.S. regulators for their combined mobility joint venture.
The BMW Group and Daimler AG have gotten the green light from anti-trust authorities in the U.S. to operate a joint venture offering a range of mobility services that are expected to grow in the future such as car sharing, charging, ride hailing and even parking.
The German automakers said the joint venture will focus on “ensuring the personal freedom of customers in the field of urban mobility, including a new mobility service that is easy to access, intuitive and focused on the needs of the user.”
The service will allow customers to move through an “ecosystem” that combines car-sharing, ride-hailing, parking and multimodality from a single source and is available with just a few taps on a phone app, the two automakers said.
The goal is to create “the most attractive, most comprehensive mobility solution for a better life in our connected world,” they said.
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With the needed anti-trust approvals in hand, the two companies hope to close the deal by Jan. 31, 2019. Once the transaction closes, the new mobility company will present next steps in the first quarter of 2019, in conjunction with the BMW Group and Daimler AG.
Daimler and BMW's new joint venture will seek to provide all of these types of services in the future.
Daimler and BMW said that more than 6 million users will benefit from intelligent and seamless connectivity between different mobility offerings, such as car sharing, bike rental, taxis and public transport, including booking and payment. The multimodal platform will also offer possible solutions for the needs of urban private transport, including providing cars as a service.
One of the most visible pieces of the joint venture will be the coordination of services offered b Daimler’s Car2Go unit and BMW DriveNow effort, which now operate a total of 20,000 vehicles in 30 major international cities. Car sharing enables better utilization of vehicles and thus helps reduce the total number of vehicles in cities.
More than 4 million customers already use the Daimler and BMW carsharing services.
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A total of 15.9 million customers and around 250,000 drivers already use the services of mytaxi, Chauffeur Privé, Clever Taxi (all in Europe) and Beat (South America) – making Intelligent Apps GmbH one of the leading ride-hailing providers in Europe and South America.
BMW's Peter Schwarzenbauer said the new partnership's goal is provide unparalleled mobility services.
Ticketless, cashless on-street parking or help reserving and paying for off-street parking in a garage is another service covered by the joint venture. Parkmobile already reaches a total of more than 27 million customers in Europe and North America and offers digital parking solutions in more than 1,100 cities.
In addition, ChargeNow and Digital Charging Solutions will also be available through the new joint venture.
Both Daimler and BMW are developing new electric vehicles and easy access charging is consider one of the keys to spurring the adoption of electric vehicles.
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The Daimler-BMW joint venture want to operate the world’s largest network of public charging stations. Combined with parking privileges in cities, this will support the expansion of electric vehicle by helping people integrate the technology more easily into their mobility needs.