Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

I’ll be at MOVE London this week (both days). If you want to catch up / get to know, DM me at Barak Sas | LinkedIn.

MOBILITY RE-IMAGINED | MOVE 2026 | 17 - 18 June 2026

MOVE is the world's #1 tech mobility event, bringing together the people and companies redefining mobility.

MOVE 2026

Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕

Toyota acquires a 1% stake in Tier IV for roughly $6.2M (P¥1bn), and even more importantly signs a MOU on technology collaboration. The first step is fitting Toyota's e-Palette shuttles with autonomous technology. Toyota’s long term plans have to do with the benefits from accessing Tier IV’s open source tech and partner network. 

Toyota takes Tier IV stake, MoU in regional autonomy push | Automotive World

UK tax authority (HMRC) wins a £190M court appeal against Bolt. The case, whether Bolt is liable ⁠to charge VAT on ​its margin (as if did), rather than on the entire fare ​(as HMRC sought), has direct implications on Uber, which has already deposited disputed tax sums of £1.446 billion. These numbers, along with 2023 revenue figures for both Uber and Bolt, suggest that in London, Uber is X7.5 larger than Bolt. In terms of market size, this would give Uber roughly 70%, Bolt +10%, with the remaining ±15% split between Freenow and other players. 

AmiGo receives approval for Level 4 operation - with safety driver, but hands-off. Operated with Apollo Go (Baidu) RT6 vehicles. Commercial services are planned for 2027. 

Baidu's Apollo Go Expands European Footprint as AmiGo, in Partnership with PostBus, Receives Level 4 Regulatory Approval in Switzerland

Bolt, Stellantis and Pony.ai launch autonomous vehicle test program in Luxembourg. The testing phase will begin with five vehicles in Bissen, with a planned expansion to 30 cities and Luxembourg City planned for later stages. 

Bolt, Pony.ai and Stellantis launch Luxembourg AV pilot | Automotive World

Waymo launches its loyalty program: Waymo Premier. For $29.99 per month, members receive 10% cash credits on every ride, 5 free ride cancellations per month, priority pickups, and early access for new cities. Looking at the competition with Uber: the program won’t be available in cities only bookable via the Uber app (Austin, Atlanta); and costs X3 Uber’s loyalty program, which is  $9.99 per month.   

Waymo buys Apple's abandoned self-driving car proving ground for $220M. The 5,500-acre (22.26 square kilometers) land in Arizona was bought by Apple for its own program, back in 2021, from Fiat Chrysler. The fact that even after decades of R&D, existing (smaller) test centres, and 4,000 vehicles on roads, Waymo needs this test centre - indicates the complexity of launching autonomy of scale. 

Tesla gets FSD approved in Belgium, joining Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia and Denmark. WeRide is getting ready to launch in Slovakia in the next few months. Dubai’s RTA signs with Pony.ai - the company joins WeRide and Baidu (Apollo Go) in the region. Uber and Wayve launch London robotaxi waitlist. Waymo lobbying in Australia. 

Bolt expands to Italy - starting with Milan. Italy is a heavily regulated taxi market. For example, Milan, with 1.3 million residents and many more tourists, has roughly 4,850 taxi permits. 

Bolt ceases its Chauffeur service. 

#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business - a consultancy focused on Innovation, Growth and Autonomy in the Mobility industry.

Mobility Business | All Things Mobility

Innovation.
Growth.
Autonomy.

www.movingppl.com

Autonomous Shuttles, DRT & Bus-Based Mobility 🚍🚌

MINIEYE, a Chinese autonomous driving technology company, signed a deal to supply more than 100 autonomous buses and associated services. The company has had commercial projects since 2025, and is operating over 40 autonomous buses across over 10 different projects. 

Uber launched a $1M Uber Transit Innovation Fund, to accelerate projects that complement public transport, such as affordable / subsidised services for non-profits and underserved communities, and overflow solutions for microtransit and public transport programs. The concept is clear: use Uber as a supplementary solution to the public transport network. So far nine cities have been announced; 11 to go. 

Zum, US school bus TaaS, is heading for an IPO. 

Shuttlers celebrates 10 million completed rides and integrates to Google Maps.  

The Ultimate 2026 Mobility & Electrification Events Calendar

The Ultimate 2026 Mobility & Electrification Events Calendar

Google Docs

Micromobility 🚲🛴

Brussels bans shared e-scooters from the city - in effect from January 2027. Bolt and Dott are the service providers in the city. With this, Brussels joins Paris, Madrid, Prague and Barcelona - all with a similar e-scooter ban. 

Barcelona will not renew dockless e-bike licenses. This was well anticipated - the tourist-focused dockless bikes scheme was poorly structured - with seven (!) different operators each operating 500 bikes - and is against the political will of “adjusting” tourism. Read the full analysis on fluctuo, also with a report on České Budějovice, the first Czech city to operate a bike-share service through its own public transport company.

Voi and pony have been selected by Ville de Marseille to operate 750 ebikes each; they replace Lime who operated a 1,000 ebike service under the former tender. Also Lime rolls out an additional 14,000 vehicles for the FIFA World Cup and Lime and Westminster City Council strike new deal on data sharing

Delivery - bikes to cars, bots & drones 🍽🧺

Last week I wrote of Uber’s attempts to buy a controlling stake in Delivery Hero - and this week we learn that Saudi q-commerce startup Ninja is interested to curve out and acquire HungerStation and Talabat, two brands active in the Middle East. It is more likely that we’ll see a bid for HungerStation, with a bid for Talabat depending on additional players joining Ninja. 

Zepto, Indian quick-commerce, updates its IPO prospectus: the company hopes to raise $1 billion in the IPO process. 

• Revenue from Operations grew from $467M in FY24 to $2.37 billion in FY26 (financial year ending March 31st)

• With losses growing as well - $619M is FY26, is 26% revenue, less than FY25 (42%) but similar to percentage loss in FY24 (27%). This indicates continued investment in expansion. 

• FY26 Free Cash Flow loss of $454M

Gopuff partners with SpaceXAI (Grok) to build an AI food ordering tool, focused on natural language usage. The video looks nice, but the product still needs to deliver (no pun intended). DoorDash isn’t behind - it is also launching its own AI chatbot. 

Walmart and Wing to expand service to San Diego later this year. Also Walmart and Subway partner to offer fully customised subs via the Walmart app. Glovo exits Bosnia, after entering in 2021. 

AV Freight, Industrial & Logistics 🚛🚜

Gatik and PepsiCo expand partnership on autonomous trucking. Gatik has been operating over 40 driverless trucks for PepsiCo across Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas since their relationship started in 2022. The focus is on regional freight movements between facilities, i.e. middle-mile. 

Einride began trading on Nasdaq (after de-SPAC). On its first day (Wednesday, June 10th) the stock soared 74%; by Friday it traded slightly under the opening price. 

Venti Technologies, autonomous logistics vehicles, reports over 500,000 miles travelled and over 340,000 containers moved. 

I love meeting new people and learning about innovation in mobility. Let’s get-to-know / catch up.

Coffee chat

25 minutes get-to-know / catch-up

app.reclaim.ai/m/Barak-Sas/25min

In other news 📰

Evotrex, hybrid RV, raises $30M. Clear Robotics raises $1.75M to build the world's largest fleet of zero-emission autonomous ships. 

Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority selected Moovit to power its multimodal transport solution. umob expands in Germany, adding emmy sharing vehicles 

BYD, Baidu and other companies (inc. Alibaba) were added to the US Section 1260H list - the list of firms with alleged Chinese military ties. While this does not mean any civil sanctions (companies on the list are banned from any defence contracts), it does pose a threat to their US expansion plans, as established companies will be less inclined to commit to long term partnerships. 

Wireless charging by Electreon - a video covering a 3 year deployment in a bus depot. 

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Florian Preusse is the new Senior Project Manager @ ioki. 

Oumarou Abdou Danneto is the new Maintenance Director @ GoCab.

Congrats and good luck!

Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

Top Story: Uber & Prosus Battle Over Delivery Hero 

Mostly reserved for the financial section, this piece of news has long term implications for the delivery - and ride-hailing - markets: Uber’s takeover efforts of Delivery Hero. 

In the Western World, there are four major delivery conglomerates: 

• US-founded DoorDash (w/Wolt in Europe & the Middle East)

• Dutch-founded Just Eat Takeaway (JET) - which has been acquired in August 2025 (Completed October) by Prosus, investment group, which also has stakes in iFood (100%, Brazil), Swiggy (28%, India), Meituan (4%, China) and a (now) 16.83% stake in Delivery Hero

• Uber Eats (no intro needed)

• And German-founded Delivery Hero, which has multiple brands, such as Talabat, Glovo, foodpanda, PedidosYa & more, covering Europe, Middle East, Asia and Latin America

Back in August 2025 Prosus completed the acquisition of JET, in the process committing to reducing its 27.4% stake in Delivery Hero (16.83% today), a mandatory requirement by the European commission to approve the JET takeover. Uber has since increased its stake in Delivery Hero to ±37% - with 24.99% voting rights, just under the 25% threshold that, according to German law, mandates a takeover bid. 

Uber did try to bid for Delivery Hero a couple weeks ago, offering to buy out at a €10 billion valuation - but that was rejected by existing players, with Prosus now fighting back, either to regain control, or to get a better deal from Uber. 

The implications for the delivery market are obvious - but it doesn’t stop there. The synergies between delivery and ride-hailing are large - both in terms of cross-subsidising and in running operations - an Uber takeover will create a ripple effect through global markets. 

This is a developing story; to be continued. 

Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕

Uber, Autobrains, and NVIDIA announced an autonomous vehicle partnership, with the first launch planned for Munich sometime in the future. This story has special meaning for two reasons, pointing to the (1) growing commoditisation of AV tech and the (2) potential strengthening of the OEMs (within the autonomy ecosystem): 

1. The use of NVIDIA’s Hyperion platform and the increased commoditisation of autonomous driving technology. Autobrains started from ADAS, not L4 directly. The company now uses multiple AI agents and the Hyperion platform (what is Hyperion) to create L4 autonomy. As time goes by, more & more autonomous tech players emerge, making autonomy, well, commoditised. 

2. The PR emphasises vehicle agnosticism, largely because the solution is based on NVIDIA's sensor architecture. Unlike existing players today, which develop for specific cars (see Waymo and Ojai), companies who develop using the Hyperion platform enjoy a wider selection of OEM and models on which to implement their technology. This strengthens the OEM position, which focuses on building cars knowing there are multiple AV tech players to work with. Autobrains, for example, is also working with Vinfast on autonomy. 

Now connect the Autobrains news to this 👇 re commoditisation: 

In London, Tym Syrytczyk sent me this picture of an autonomous Mercedes using what looks like DeepMap mapping technology, and connected the dots: 

• NVIDIA acquired DeepMap back in 2021

• NVIDIA announces partnership with Mercedes in January 2026

• In March 2026, NVIDIA partners with Uber to launch a “global fleet of entirely NVIDIA software-driven autonomous vehicles” in 28 cities by 2028. 

A similar one was spotted by Harry Campbell in San Francisco (picture). 

BYD is offering a one year full damage coverage guarantee for crashes occurring while using the Urban Navigation on Autopilot (NOA) function of its God’s Eye version 5.0, BYD’s L2+ ADAS system. This is the first time an OEM is committing to the potential negative results of using ADAS systems. BYD said that a similar move, parking guarantee given in the past, lifted usage from 21% to 93%, and the company hopes it would do the same for ADAS usage. 

Uber overall investment Nuro has reached close to $500M. We don’t know how much stake Uber now has in Nuro, but based on past funding rounds, it is likely somewhere between 5% and 10%. Also Uber to roll out 500 fully-sensor-loaded Hyundai Ioniq 5 vehicles, as part of the AV Lab division aim to collect data for Uber and partners. 

Uber increased its stake in Careem, acquiring an additional 12.5% of the company for $100M from e&, reducing e&’s stake from 50.03% to 37.53%. Ride-hailing has been fully controlled by Uber since the 2020 Carrem acquisition; in 2023 e& acquired a majority stake in Careem’s super app business (food delivery, grocery delivery, payments, and other digital offerings) for $400M, as part of its strategy to expand digital consumer services. This new deal reflects a leadership and focus change at e&. 

Waymo welcomes Ojai (pronounced oh-hi) - the new purpose-built and co-designed electric minivan Zeekr vehicle. Up to now the vehicle has been in employee closed group testing, and is now opening to the public, first in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco. 

Waymo Finally Opens Ojai Robotaxis to Riders

Same Driver, new vehicle: Welcoming our first riders trips in the Ojai

WeRide and Uber to launch robotaxi in Madrid. The companies work together in the UAE; this is a European first. AVOMO will be the fleet operator. Service (testing) to begin later this year. This is the 4th city from the total 15 cities set in the May 2025 strategic partnership between the two companies, which aims to launch autonomous services in 15 global cities by 2030. 

Uber Technologies, Inc. - WeRide, Uber, and AVOMO Bring Robotaxis to Madrid

This video shows a Dallas officer trying to move a Waymo, which is obstructing a road needed for emergency services. What I find interesting about this video is: (1) the lack of pre-planned coordination between the Waymo remote assistance team and the emergency forces; (2) the unwillingness of the officer to identify by name, perhaps as a result of no clear protocols; and (3) the helplessness of the Waymo remote assistance team. The vehicle was manually moved by the officer. 

Uklon partners with Elmo to pilot remote driving technology at the Boryspil International Airport, near Kyiv. For now in trial mode only, the airport plans to use this technology once air space reopens and flights resume. 

In Texas, Tesla self-certified its robotaxis as Level 4 autonomous. You can do that in Texas. Tesla’s fleet in the state is relatively small - 42 registered and less active (via Robotaxi Tracker). Texas also mandates registration of autonomous vehicles, so we know the numbers: Waymo 577, Avride 317, Nuro 47, MOIA 12. 

CaoCao expanded its robotaxi fleet in Binjiang, Hangzhou, to 100 vehicles. CaoCao partners with Shanghai International Automotive City to deploy commercial robotaxis in the city. Momenta is granted permit for autonomous road testing in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, China (near Shanghai). Kazakhstan prepares to launch driverless taxi service in 2026, led by both Yandex and InDrive. 

A major play in the UK minicab (private-hire / taxi) ecosystem: Veezu makes a strategic investment in Cab9. Why is this meaningful: Veezu is the largest traditional private-hire/taxi group in the UK, growing via acquisitions, with >16,000 driver partners across over 50 cities, serving 25+ million passenger journeys annually, and up to now using iCabbi for its entire fleet. Cab9 is the 3rd largest taxi dispatch company, behind iCabbi (Renault) and Autocab (Uber), and has been a rising player over the past years. This means that Veezu will both transition to Cab9 (bad news for iCabbi) and enjoy the connection to existing Cab9 customers, which it normally acquires to maintain growth. 

Vinfast enters India’s ride-hailing market - expands its Green SM electric taxi service to the Delhi-NCR region. Ola Consumer (ride-hailing Ola) valuation has dropped from a $7.3 billion peak to $70M today. The company has lost India to Uber and Rapido. 

Ola's Ride-Hailing Business Worth Less Than The Ola Electric Shares It Holds After 99% Valuation Cut

Uber and Lyft drivers in Massachusetts form the first US ride-share union after collecting signatures from 25% active drivers; it represents nearly 70,000 ride-share drivers. Back in 2024, when the law allowing unionization took place, Uber and Lyft approved of it, as long as the independent contractor status would not change. It didn’t, and the companies did not stand in the way of the union. Spoiler to drivers afraid of autonomy: you are going to lose to robot drivers exactly the same way taxis lost to you, i.e. to gig-economy drivers.  

A study looking at Waymo data of 86 million total vehicle miles traveled over approximately 14 million Waymo robotaxi trips finds that Waymo travels with passengers 54% of miles traveled. This is on par with existing ride-hailing deadheading stats, which raises the question: is Uber's (or any other large TNC, for that matter) system already efficient in terms of vehicle positioning to an extent in which autonomous is only a slight improvement? 

The Self-Driving Industry Awards 2026 (or SDIA26 in short) is an annual event organised by Cars of The Future, celebrating autonomy. This year there are 12 categories, from aftermarket to fleet operations via legal to software. You can take a look at the event here, apply to the award here (by 5pm on Friday 11 September 2026) or just visit the website to learn more: 

Autonomous Vehicle and Driving News - Cars of the Future

Cars of the Future- reporting the development and encouraging debate in all aspects of self-driving, covering autonomous vehicle news from around the world

Cars of the Future

#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business - a consultancy focused on Innovation, Growth and Autonomy in the Mobility industry.

Mobility Business | All Things Mobility

Innovation.
Growth.
Autonomy.

www.movingppl.com

Autonomous Shuttles, DRT & Bus-Based Mobility 🚍🚌

Atlanta launches first autonomous public transit service pilot. Tech by ADASTEC, bus by Karsan, operations by Beep. 

ATL Spoke Launches as Atlanta’s First Autonomous Public Transit Service Pilot

Finland to begin operating a commercial driverless public transport robot bus, without a  safety driver. Vehicle & Tech by Ohmio, operations by Remoted. 

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/elina-uusitalo-7799944b_automation-autonomousvehicles-smartmobility-activity-7465367043404603392-iJr4

WeRide Robobus service returns to Roland-Garros, The Robobus will operate along a 2.8-kilometre route with a journey time of 12 minutes, connecting three stops, running from 24 May to 7 June, operating daily from 10.30am to 5pm, 6pm to 8pm, and 10pm to midnight.

Accidents happen. An ADASTEC / Karsan bus operating in Gothenburg, Sweden, has been involved in an accident with a tram on its first day in passenger service (May 25th). The tram approached the bus from behind and crashed into it; reasons for the incident are not yet clear. At the time the service was carrying paying passengers, as part of a year-long autonomous public transport trial in Gothenburg. 

Sustainable Bus

The Ultimate 2026 Mobility & Electrification Events Calendar

The Ultimate 2026 Mobility & Electrification Events Calendar

Google Docs

Micromobility 🚲🛴

Uklon acquires E-WINGS for roughly $2.2M, in Uklon’s 1st M&A deal. E-WINGS, founded in Ukraine, is live in 11 Ukrainian cities with a fleet of circa 3,000 e-scooters. Uklon just added micromobility to its portfolio. Congrats. 

Goldman Sachs invests in Ryde in a majority stake deal (partial exit). Ryde:

• Operates in 69 cities across Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Germany

• Fleet of over 120k vehicles 

• 880k monthly active users who completed 63m trips in 2025

• Revenue in 2025 was €75.5M, with EBITDA of €30.4M

Dott reports Q1/26 numbers: 

• Revenue down 6% YoY to €28.4M revenue 

• Fleet size 124k vehicles

• EBIT narrowed to -€19.2M from -€27.0M; Adjusted EBITDA losses improved to -€4.0M from -€8.8M

• Reaffirmed its FY 2026 Adjusted EBITDA guidance of €30-40M

Voi and Bolt win Stockholm e-scooter license; Lime to exit. Bolt won a licence to operate 3,500 e-scooters in Frankfurt. Voi UK: new in Aberdeen, successful in Glasgow and plans to expand in Southampton. Lime removed speed restrictions for delivery drivers and might be rolling back on that after the public noticed. Beam exits Tasmania. 

Delivery - bikes to cars, bots & drones 🍽🧺

CargoX, autonomous delivery platform based in the UAE, raised $250M. CargoX deploys driverless delivery vehicles across last-mile, middle-mile and long-haul routes; funds will be used to expand in the UAE and internationally. 

Matternet, drone deliveries, raises $33M in a private placement offering (selling shares directly to investors) and completed a reverse merger (became public but is not trading). Funds will be used to “launch its next-generation drone delivery platform and expand commercial operations across food, retail, and healthcare”. 

iFood launches food delivery in São Paulo with Speedbird Aero; and is suing Meituan-backed Keeta over alleged espionage. Walmart celebrates 1 million drone deliveries. In Ireland, Manna is too close to a church. Neolix and QuikBot partner in Singapore. 

I love meeting new people and learning about innovation in mobility. Let’s get-to-know / catch up.

Coffee chat

25 minutes get-to-know / catch-up

app.reclaim.ai/m/Barak-Sas/25min

In other news 📰

Blablacar expands to eight new LATAM markets. Developing markets, such as LATAM and India, have shown the greatest growth. 

FORT Robotics, trust layer for physical AI, acquires Mapless AI, US-founded vehicle teleoperation and autonomy supervision. 

Revel and Volterra merge under the Volterra brand, combining Voltera’s development and infrastructure capabilities with Revel’s urban charging footprint and operating experience. 

Vianova launches new “street level” intelligence platform - designed to help cities make sense of the vast amount of data they hold. 

Waymo gives batteries a second life - partnering with B2U Storage Solutions to repurpose old EV batteries from the Waymo fleet. Circular economy at its best. 

london riders report - the map shows all the Transport for London (tube) system's trips taken on a typical weekday.

london riders

anita.garden/londonriders

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Adrien Ravet is the new Head of M&A and Corporate Development - Europe @ Modaxo. 

Amit Summer-Galai is the new Director OEM Programs @ Electreon. 

Giles Kinnersley is the new Founder & CEO @ Electronas X. 

Ivan Chornohor is the new Vice President of Supply & Driver Operations @ Uklon. 

Jonathan Padmore is the new Senior Partnership Manager @ Tactran. 

Mark Collins is the new Head of Product @ West Midlands Combined Authority. 

Mike Wilkes is the new National Key Account Manager @ Veezu. 

Ofer Segal is the new Sales And Marketing Specialist @ SafeFields Technologies. 

Paul Drummond is the new Settlement & Specialist Services Director, Transport & Mobility @ Magellan. 

Philip Gerhardt is the new Commercial Director - Arriva London @ Arriva UK Bus. 

Ram Karia is the new Charter Lead (Private Hire) UK&I @ Zeelo. 

Robin Arts is the new GTM Operations Specialist @ Cargoplot. 

Stewart Lightbody is the new Fleet Manager @ Fortem Solutions.

Congrats and good luck!

Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

Top Story: Uber Targets Delivery Hero

Uber is trying to take over Delivery Hero. A €11.5 billion takeover offer was rejected by Delivery Hero and Uber is considering upping that offer. Last week Uber increased its stake in the company from 7% to 19.5% + 5.6% in options - an increase of its stake to over 30% triggers a mandatory offer to the remaining shareholders.

Current top shareholders include:

• Prosus, which recently acquired Just Eat Takeaway and led the latest Rapido round, with 16.8%

• Aspex Management, activist investment managers, with 14.6%

• Morgan Stanley, with 30%

Delivery Hero also holds 87% of Woowa Brothers -  which operate Baemin, a top South Korean delivery service. Last week it was reported that Uber was considering Baemin’s acquisition, together with Naver, a South Korean online platform. 

This  is an ongoing story. To be continued.

Top Story: Waymo Scale On Temporary Hold

Waymo pauses freeway (highway) rides and its Atlanta operations to improve performance around construction zones and flooded roadways; this follows a full fleet (3,791 vehicles) recall earlier the month. 

The past few weeks saw:

• Waymo confused and blocking streets in Atlanta

• Waymo entering flooded roads

Waymo also experiencing challenges in London. In Brent*, the Green Party, which just won the local borough election, is asking the Mayor to pause autonomous vehicle trials, on safety, congestion and potential job loss grounds. It doesn’t help that Waymo keeps driving into dead end streets and making a lot of noise at 4am while trying to reverse. Video here. Also people are starting to attack Waymos. 

* In a nutshell, London comprises 32 boroughs / local authorities, plus The City of London, which is a separate governing district, bringing the total to 33 separate entities. Brent is one of those, located in West/North-West London with a population of 353,000 (of the roughly 9 million in the city, or ±4%).  

I had the honour of interviewing on the new season of NECTURE Conversations, a season dedicated to scaling autonomy "Across the First Million". Christian Adelsberger and I spoke about: 

-> Waymo as an experience (not a tech) company

-> Urban microhubs key for autonomous fleet management

-> how Uber commands all of the autonomous value chain and what (breadcrumbs) that leaves to others

#1 - "It takes time to scale"

Conversation Journeys & Across the First Million · Episode

Spotify

Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕

Rapido raises $240M at a $3 billion valuation, in a round led by Prosus. Funds will be used to to increase footprint in high-growth markets, strengthen driver network, and invest in technology and platform efficiency. Rapido, which originated from motorbike and rickshaw budget rides, is expanding into car-based ride-hailing and into food delivery via the Ownly brand. 

Bliq received approval to operate its vehicles on public roads in Estonia without a driver behind the wheel. This is a European 1st, as Verne still uses safety drivers. Bliq’s current product combines an AI based Level 2 driving system with remote human supervision to operate commercial services. 

Nuro received approval to test its Lucid Gravity SUVs without a human safety driver on public roads at speeds up to 45 mph (56km/h). And Nuro expands to Germany, establishing its European hub, which includes engineering, operations, and partner engagement.

In Korea, Hyundai signed an MOU with the government and autonomy startups Autonomous A2Z and Ride Flux to develop and operate 200 autonomous vehicles based on the Ioniq 5 platform. 42dot will analyse data to improve its autonomy development. Korea is keen not to fall behind the US and China in the AV race. 

On paper (& PR), the Verne autonomous deployment uses 10 vehicles, operating from 7am to 9pm daily, with safety drivers that hardly intervene, serving 300 riders via the Verne app, getting very high ratings, with a fixed promotional-price-per-ride of €1.99. According to Marek Vanzura, only ±3 cars are active at any time, with safety drivers conscious of people taking photos. The Verne original vehicles, ±60 already built, were designed for Mobileye sensors, and when Mobileye failed to deliver, are now awaiting redesign for Pony.ai tech.  

Stellantis and Wavye partner on hands-off, eyes-on (aka L2++) tech; vehicles to launch with the technology in 2028. Also Wayve signs an MOU with the UK’s Department for Business and Trade (DBT) to accelerate the commercialisation of self-driving technology.

May Mobility and ECARX agree on a strategic framework agreement, which sees ECARX supply May Mobility with central computing platforms and sensor suites, in a deal worth circa $750M.  

Tesla FSD approved in Lithuania, the 2nd European country after the Netherlands. Expected next: Belgium, Greece and Ireland. Tesla reveals information on robotaxi crashes, 17 in total since launching in June 2025, two involving remote driving operators. Uber driver falls asleep (video) while in FSD mode, passenger records. This is a reminder of the gap between Tesla’s FSD daily usage (high) and robotaxi capabilities (low). 

What people in San Francisco think of autonomous vehicles: 42% think AVs are “a good thing”, 39% a mix of good & bad, 18% bad. If you are progressive or conservative without a college degree, your chances are likely to dislike AVs. 

SF Chronicle

Dubai Taxi Company (DTC) acquires National Taxi (Abu Dhabi), meaning also that Bolt expands to Abu Dhabi piggybacking on DTC’s expansion. Bolt partners with Dongfeng Motor Group to roll out electric vehicles in South Africa. A fleet management company called Yugo Rides will operate the vehicles. The UK tax authority decision is that Bolt isn’t eligible for a £190M VAT exemption. The case, which refers to recent tax rules changes in the UK , is now in court. To be continued. 

InDrive partners with GoCab, vehicle financing, to unlock vehicle access across Morocco and Chile’s ride-hailing markets. At first, GoCab will finance 1,000 drivers, with the total number to reach 4,000 drivers. Yango is fined £100 million by the Dutch Data Protection Authority for allegedly sharing personal data of users in Norway and Finland with Russia. Yango is expected to appeal. Kakao Mobility eyes Nasdaq listing also keeping options open. Uklon expands in Uzbekistan. Freenow and Wallbox partner on taxi charging. 

Gridwise report shows premium rides are during ride-hailers growth: a mix of increased usage and higher margins. 

Gridwise

#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business - a consultancy focused on Innovation, Growth and Autonomy in the Mobility industry.

Mobility Business | All Things Mobility

Innovation.
Growth.
Autonomy.

www.movingppl.com

Autonomous Shuttles, DRT & Bus-Based Mobility 🚍🚌

Via Q1/26 financial report: 

• Revenue up 29% to $127.4M (how much of this is DownTowner?)

• Gross Profit down from 40.4% to 39.3%

• Net loss increased to $20.15M, from $16.3M in Q1/25

• Cash and cash equivalents of $348M (as of March 31, 2026) - Via still has time to reach profitability and positive FCF

FlixBus partners with Green Drive Mobility to launch electric intercity bus services in India - for now - only 4 buses.

Events to watch our for:

The Ultimate 2026 Mobility & Electrification Events Calendar

Google Docs

Micromobility 🚲🛴

Swapfiets, bike subscription, Netherlands, acquires Dance, bike subscription. Germany. 

Porsche closes ebike business, focusing on core activities. 

Nextbike rolls out ‘MyRadl’: a public bike sharing network with a fleet of 6,700 bikes and 1,000 stations connecting Munich with 36 surrounding towns, parishes and municipalities.

Voi relaunches in Copenhagen with 4,500 e-bikes and with 350 in Aberdeen. 

The UK is yet again holding back on E-scotter regulation. What started as a national trial in July 2020 has been extended again and again, currently to May 2028. In the meanwhile, use of E-scooters is only permitted under government-backed trials. Newcastle ends scooters in the city; Neuron will leave its last UK city.  E-bikes are also under scrutiny.

Delivery - bikes to cars, bots & drones 🍽🧺

Talabat - 85% owned by who if not Delivery Hero - reports strong Q1 results, grows GMV by 19% to $2.7 billion and revenue by 23% to $1 billion. Net income $87M.   

Amazon launches “Amazon now” - their 30-minute delivery service - across dozens of US cities. 3 and 1 hour delivery services already exists in multiple US cities.  

Deliveroo (DoorDash) releases features which allow ordering from 3 stores in one basket (multi-store ordering functionality) and the ability to add items from a nearby retailer to the restaurant order within a ten-minute checkout window.

Keeta to launch drone delivery in the UAE. 

AV Freight, Industrial & Logistics 🚛🚜

Einride starts a public road autonomous project in Ohio with EASE Logistics. Two Einride autonomous electric trucks will conduct daily operation on public and private roads between EASE Logistics warehouses. 

Also Einride moves toward Nasdaq listing (via SPAC at $1.35 valuation). 

I love meeting new people and learning about innovation in mobility. Let’s get-to-know / catch up.

Coffee chat

30 minutes get-to-know / catch-up

calendar.app.google/UKejPH4dn5vZdRAYA

In other news 📰

Expedia acquires CarTrawler, a car rental platform. This acquisition follows an earlier one in 2026 of tiqets, experience ticketing, as Expedia diversifies on its way to become a super-app. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but industry sources speculated the company would be worth north of $450M (€387M).

Circuit, electric microtransit solutions, raises $17M. 

Aboard, electric travel trailers, raises $13M. 

UFOFLEET acquires FleetMaster from Cox Automotive, terms of deal undisclosed. 

GBR is a threat to Trainline. 

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Chris Ashley is the new Head of Policy @ Road Haulage Association (RHA). 

Dan Cheng is the new Staff Technical Project Manager at Vammo. 

Julien Trost is the new General Manager New Services @ Upway. 

Lukas Schrader is the new Vice President, Vehicle Platform Engineering @ May Mobility. 

Minh Ta Tran is the new SEVP of FPT Automotive @ FPT Automotive. 

Mridul Nischal is the new AVP - Business Solutioning @ Drivn. 

Sílvia Coronado is the new Project Manager @ Drivania Chauffeurs.

Congrats and good luck!

Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

Two Takeaways for an Autonomous Future 🔮

1) Car-sharing will pivot or become irrelevant. Today, it is a struggling industry, as evident by the recent GoMore-Getaround merger, rumours of Miles exploring autonomous ride-hailing, and the closure earlier this year of Zipcar London and Zity. High interest rates, volatile residual values, EV depreciation, rising insurance costs and the expensive transition to electric fleets are all putting heavy pressure on the sector.

In an autonomous future, the line between ride-hailing and car-sharing blurs, with car-sharing operators becoming direct competitors to the likes of Uber and Bolt. The question is whether they have the capital and operational capability to make that shift. Time will tell.

2) It’s the control over the vehicle asset that matters. What started with Flexdrive by Lyft, Uber’s investment in Moove, and financing partnerships from inDrive, DiDi and other ride-hailing platforms, just got another major push with the Uber-Santander deal to support up to £1 billion in vehicle assets for Uber partner fleets. Not necessarily ownership - but control.

In an autonomous future, control over the vehicle asset becomes even more important as a way to guarantee supply, utilisation and uptime. That is why Uber is backing deals for tens of thousands of autonomous-ready vehicles and why ride-hailing platforms are increasingly partnering with AV technology companies and OEMs.

Ironically, car-sharing companies are already built around owning and operating fleets. In an autonomous world, that may become an advantage.

At least until privately owned AVs eventually enter shared mobility networks at scale.

#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business - a consultancy focused on Innovation, Growth and Autonomy in the Mobility industry.

Mobility Business | All Things Mobility

Innovation.
Growth.
Autonomy.

www.movingppl.com

Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕

Uber partners with Santander to deliver a €1 billion finance package designed for Uber’s partner fleets. Uber benefits from committed fleets, which are bound to providing dedicated capacity to the Uber platform; Santander takes less risk, because it has a ‘greenlight’ from Uber that the fleet gets a minimal volume of work from the platform; and the fleets get better loan rates, providing they stay committed to Uber. Uber intends to deploy this capital in places where professional fleets enjoy regulatory safeguarding, such as Spain, Germany and Italy. Bottom line: in a non-gig economy market, assets are key. 

Verne in Zagreb - operating 10 robotaxis for a flat fee of €1.99 a ride. The ODD is roughly 90 sq. km in the city and airport, with 300 people having access to the Verne app. There are also accidents - the last known one was on March 23, 2026, when a Arcfox Alpha T5 robotaxi from Pony AI and operated by Verne was rear-ended by an Opel Combo, with likely cause being phantom braking.

Avride is under investigation for self-driving crashes. The NHTSA has opened the investigation after 16 crashes and one minor injury. In all cases, a safety driver was in the vehicle, and for some reason, was unable to stop the crashes. Uber recently started a commercial deployment with Avride (safety driver included) in Dallas, where many of the crashes happened. 

Waymo begins fully autonomous operations with Ojai vehicles in Phoenix. Waymo is stuck in a puddle (video). 

The Dutch regulators approved Tesla’s FSD (unsupervised) and are now waiting for the EU to approve, with the vote expected July the earliest. If approved, FSD could spread quickly across Europe. 

Tesla FSD Europe Tracker - Regulatory Approval Status

Track Tesla Full Self-Driving Supervised regulatory approval status across Europe with real-time updates.

Tesla FSD Europe Tracker

Indonesia cuts ride-hailing maximum commission taken from drivers to 8% (from 20%) and focus companies to offer accident and health insurance. When the regulation will go into effect is unclear. Possible outcomes: the creation new platform fees or could change the market to a subscription-based one. In any case, it deters new entrants. 

Bolt and the Dubai Taxi Company (DTC) launch Bolt School - allowing pre-booked rides starting/ending in schools at relevant times with enhanced safety procedures, and a 20% launch discount. 

Careem scales back across multiple Middle East and Gulf States markets, including scaling back Saudi operations, closing the Berlin tech office and laying off hundreds of employees in a global restructuring. .

Uber’s Q1/26 results - key takeaways: more trips, more money, lower take rate, better profitability

• Trips grew 20% YoY to 3.6 billion 

• Monthly Active Platform Consumer (MAPCs)  grew 17% to 199 million; Monthly trips per MAPC grew 3%

• Gross bookings grew 25% to $53.7 billion

• Revenue grew 14% to $13.2 billion 

• Take rate (revenue/gross bookings) is 24.6% - down from 27% in Q1/25.

• EBITDA margin on gross bookings increased from 4.4% to 4.6%. The higher EBITDA margin despite lower take rate reflects operating & scale efficiency.

For the PR, 8-K and 10-Q.  

Lyft’s Q1/26 results - key takeaways

• Rides grew 8.5% to 236.9M  

• Gross bookings up 19% YoY to $4.9 billion

• Revenue up 17% to $1.65 billion - 33.3% revenue margin

• Net income of $14.2M compared to $2.6M in Q1'25

For the 8-K and 10-Q.  

Grab Q1/26 results - key takeaways: 

• On-Demand GMV grew 24% YoY to $6.1 billion

• Revenue grew 24% to $955 million - 15.6%revenue margin 

• Profit for the period of $120M, versus $10M in Q1/25

For the PR and investors deck. 

Uber in the Autonomous Future. The 1st version of Uber saw rapid expansion that led to “regulatory battles and a corporate crisis that damaged trust for years”; this time - Uber is set on working with governments and cities to lead the robotaxi evolution, focusing on the challenges associated with safety, labour concerns and service accessibility & coverage. Read the introduction by Andrew Macdonald, Uber’s President and COO; the full report can be found here. 

This is a forward thinking approach on behalf of Uber, touching on key points, such as: 

• Advocating for a Hybrid model - in which human drivers cover peak demand, bad weather, lower-density areas, accessibility needs, and edge cases such as areas with infrastructure changes or emergency situations. In addition, Uber acknowledges that not all cities will be economically or technically viable for AVs. 

• Openly admitting AVs will reduce driver work, giving the example that “In California, “one AV does the work of about four drivers”. Uber does not offer a solution, but states that other jobs in fleet management and remote driving will be available. Uber also warns of the possibility of increased mileage and congestion. 

Bottom line: Uber is calling on governments and cities to take an active part in the autonomous future, while positioning itself as “the good guy”. 

Autonomous Shuttles, DRT & Bus-Based Mobility 🚍🚌

MOIA starts public, on-road validation testing of its purpose-built, autonomous ID. Buzz, in Los Angeles. The testing fleet will scale to 100 vehicles before commercial rides commence with Uber, toward the end of 2026. 

Also Beep and MOIA to deploy in Orlando, as part of the new strategic partnership between the companies to operate autonomous public transport. No deployment timeline given. For now, validation testing has started in Lake Nona, Florida, an existing Beep deployment with Navya vehicles. MOIA rides in Lake Nona expected later this year. 

Routematic rolls out COCO Rides, a fixed-route, high-capacity commuting solution in the Pune IT hub. The service targets 125,000 employees, and will begin with 80 buses operating on 70 routes, with 500 boarding points. 

Enjoy a 10% discount to Micromobility Europe 2026. This premier European micromobility event will feature C-level speakers from Voi, Dott, Ryde, Third Lane Mobility, Lyft, Cooltra, Bolt and government officials from London, Amsterdam, Paris - with many more speakers and attendees. 2-3 June, Berlin. For the 10% discount: 

Micromobility Europe 2026

10% off

Tito • Team Tito

Car Sharing/renting 🚗

GoMore acquires Getaround Europe, P2P car sharing, for an undisclosed price. The GoMore Group will now have more than 70,000 vehicles in 11 European countries, operating more than 1.5 million rentals annually, with net revenues of over €50M. 

GoMore operates in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Austria & Switzerland and in Spain via the Amovens brand (which it acquired back in 2015); it is the Amovens entity which is the direct acquirer. With this acquisition GoMore adds / enhances presence in France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Norway & Austria. 

Zity car-sharing service will stop operating in Madrid on May 21, the last city in which Zity operated. The closure of all of Zity services was announced back in December 2025. Greenwheels adds 11 vehicles in two towns South-West of Amsterdam. 

Miles Mobility, German free-floating car-sharing, might be looking to expand to autonomous ride-hailing.  

Micromobility 🚲🛴

Lime files for IPO on the Nasdaq. Key stats: 

• 2025 Revenue increased by 29.1% to $886.7M. Geo breakdown: 32% US, 22% UK, France 10%, RoW 36%

• Uber drove 14% of revenue; that contributes to marketing spend being only 2% of revenue

• Net losses of $59.3M in 2025, versus from $33.9M in 2024

• 2025 Free cash flow was $104M

• Debt: $1 billion in current liabilities, roughly $846M of that is due 12 months from now

• Lime reported having $261M in cash on March 31, 2026. I.e. the proceeding from the IPO will go toward covering or restructuring those loans

To put in perspective. Voi 2025 revenue was €178M, with negative profit before tax of €11.5M. Interestingly, those losses are similar - roughly (minus) 6.5% of revenue

Donkey Republic Q1/26 report - key takeaways: 

• Revenue up 9.9% YoY to DKK 29.0M (±€3.9M)

• EBITDA DKK -1.2M (€160,500)

• 23,381 Average active bikes and 1.3M trips indicate TVD of 0.62

Fluctuo’s European Share Mobility 2025 Review - key takeaways: 

• Total number of trips increased by 16% to 709 million while “End User Revenue” grew 10% to €1.45 billion. 

• Of the total 848,000 shared vehicles operating across Europe, 48% are bikes, 48% are scooters, and 4% are mopeds. 

• Public bike schemes have a fleet size of 238,000 and TVD of 2.7 (up from 2.5 YoY); Private bike schemes have a fleet size of 147,000 and TVD of 2.3 (up from 1.7 in 2024) 

• Scooters - less cities and smaller fleets, but more trips. With cities such as Paris and Madrid opting out of scooters, fleet numbers are down 22% from the 2023 peak. Yet total rides are growing - 312 million in 2025 - evident of increased utilisation and stickiness. 

Download the full report. 

Delivery - bikes to cars, bots & drones 🍽🧺

Amazon delivers its first UK parcels by drone. The launch in Darlington covers an area of 7.5 mile (12km) radius, with drones carrying up to 2.2kg of products. Darlington is the only location outside of the US in which Amazon operates drone deliveries.  

'We had people come just to see it': Amazon delivers its first UK parcels by drone - BBC News

Deliveroo launches in-app restaurant bookings. First to be rolled out in London, this is enabled thanks to the DoorDash acquisition (& the SevenRooms acquisition).

AV Freight, Industrial & Logistics 🚛🚜

Kodiak raises $100M at a steep discount of $6.5 per share, well below the closing price of $9.1. Consequently, stock falls 37%, partially recovering by the times these lines are written. Funds will be used to scale on-road and off-road business. Current market cap is roughly $1.3 billion. 

As part of the raise, Kodiak announced a commercial autonomous truck contract in Canada (safety driver included) and a new partnership on autonomous ground vehicles for defense applications.

Aurora signs with McLane, a distribution company, to commercially transport goods between Dallas and Houston. Texas. Safety driver is out - “human observer” in; this time Paccar is in agreement. The use case is expected: Aurora’s tech drive on the freeway, with local drivers taking over in terminals located off the highway near Dallas and Houston, and performing the ‘last mile(s)’ driving manually. ’

Einride co-leading development to fit this nameless vehicle in the picture with AV technology, de facto developing a SaaS version of their AV stack. The vehicle is designed to deliver food and medicine to rural locations in peacetime, and to support military logistics during wartime

Einride to develop Swedish dual-use tracked AV | Automotive World

Watch a 12:30 minutes video of Bot Auto’s autonomous truck 231 mile (370 km) journey. 

I love meeting new people and learning about innovation in mobility. Let’s get-to-know / catch up.

Coffee chat

25 minutes get-to-know / catch-up

app.reclaim.ai/m/Barak-Sas/25min

In other news 📰

AI will soon enable anyone to open a restaurant - Wonder is building robotic kitchens that will function as AI-powered 'restaurant factories' - letting aspiring restaurateurs spin up entirely new food brands with simple text prompts.

Joby conducts first air taxi demonstration in New York City. 

The Robinson R66 is considered the world's leading light single-turbine helicopter, with over 1,500 units in service and consistent sales since its 2010 launch. Now, the eR66, the electric version, is under development. 

Ohmio, the AV Shuttle company, wins a tender to supply electronic signage solutions in California. I was not aware of this line of business; revenue diversification is important seeing the pace of adoption in the AV industry. 

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Michael Flaster is the General Manager, Israel R&D Center @ Via.

Yves Helven is the new General Manager Fleet Management APAC @ ORIX Fleet. 

Congrats and good luck!

Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

#movingpeople - All Things Mobility

Subscribe here.

movingpeople.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Top Story: Uber Partners With Hertz for Autonomous Fleet Management 

This story opens the news for the meaning it carries for (a) Hertz and the entire rental industry, (b) Uber and (c) Lucid. 

For Hertz, and any rental company, managing autonomous fleets is an excellent fit and a future opportunity. Fleet operations are already rental companies’ core competency: charging, maintenance, repairs, cleaning and depot operations are all performed today. This specific partnership will be delivered via Oro Mobility, a Hertz subsidiary, which is already active in the ride-hailing industry, leasing vehicles to Uber drivers and operating ride-hailing fleets with hourly employed drivers on the Uber platform.

The autonomous opportunity is relevant for Hertz - and for any other rental company - Enterprise & Avis to name a few (Avis already working with Waymo in Dallas). While rental companies are an excellent fit for managing autonomous fleets, they have mostly been quiet so far. Maybe this will change now. 

For Uber, this is another building block in its AV strategy; by partnering with Hertz it gets access to large distributed networks across both major cities and smaller markets, globally. This scale cannot be achieved with Moove / Avomo. 

This deal is currently designed for Lucid-Nuro vehicles, representing a 35,000 vehicle opportunity. Lucid will enjoy working with a dedicated aftermarket partner and gets its cars in front of Hertz (which keeps on buying ‘normal’ vehicles). 

Win-win-win. 

Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕

Uber held its annual “GO-GET” global product event, announcing a slew of new features, all designed with the “one app for everything – helping you go, get, and now travel” in mind. Key takeaway - Uber is expanding beyond rides and delivery into travel, on-route to super-app. Main features include: 

1. Hotels: by partnering with Expedia, Uber not only allows booking via the app, but also adds hotel bookings into the Uber One subscription scheme, allowing for up to 20% discounts and 10% in credits. Later this year, Uber will launch home rentals through Vrbo (an Expedia brand). 

2. Travel: your personal travel concierge. Local recommendations on tourist destinations; restaurant booking via OpenTable; “room service” (deliveries) for any travel essentials and additional functions to manage travel experience. 

3. Eats for the Way: fancy a coffee and a bite? The new feature allows you to book those to the car, for Uber Black bookings. The driver will pick it up on the way. 

4. Shop for Me: request items from any store, and Uber will make it happen. 

See the GO-Get page and Dara’s blog post for more new features and plans. 

Uber acquires Hong Kong e-hail taxi platform FlyTaxi. This isn’t Uber’s first acquisition in the market - in 2021 it acquired HKTaxi, a competing solution, integrated it into the Uber platform, and shut it down in 2025. The result of that acquisition was the growth of FlyTaxi, founded 2013. Now FlyTaxi is also being acquired. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed. 

Uber launches Uber Moto in Basel, Switzerland. This is the first European city to experience the two-wheeler ride service. 50 electric motorcycles will be deployed in the city, allowing a 30% cheaper product than the car-based solution. 

Zoox to deploy its robotaxi in Miami. The company has been testing (using Toyota SUVs) in the city since mid-2024. Zoox is currently available in Las Vegas and San Francisco (commercial operations) and has recently deployed in Austin. In Vegas, the company started testing airport rides, with employees as riders. 

Twitter tweet

In early April Baidu experienced a system failure, which caused over 100 vehicles in Wuhan to suddenly freeze on the spot. Now China is suspending issuing of new autonomous vehicle licences, to be resumed pending government review of the incident. Baidu has yet to publicly comment on the incident. Note: this does not affect existing Baidu robotaxi operations in Wuhan. 

Tesla shows its Cybercab drive off the production line. 

Twitter tweet

Full Self-Driving (Supervised) has now traveled over 10 billion miles, and counting. 

Full Self-Driving (Supervised) Vehicle Safety Report

Tesla

Vay grows Las-Vegas fleet to 175 vehicles, expands remote driving serving area, partners with hospitality staffing platform Goodwrx for ride-discounts, and announces over 60,000 Vegas rides to date. 

Grab awarded the first-ever cross-border ride-hail service operator licence, connecting Singapore and Malaysia. That border sees 450,000 crossings per day.  

Lyft’s Baidu vehicles arrived in London. 

David Risher

Autonomous vehicles could pose a threat to the airline industry (and also to existing road infrastructure and the desire to limit the personal car). 

Twitter tweet

Waymo begins manually driving in Portland, ahead of an expected robotaxi launch, probably later this year. Waymo can’t park at destination. Waymo drives away with luggage. 

Pony.ai to develop its Gen-7 robotaxi at a cost of roughly $31,500 (230,000 yuan). 

Geely introduces its purpose built robotaxi, expected to scale via the CaoCao network. 

Geely Introduces China’s First Purpose-Built Robotaxi | Carscoops

California adopts new AV regulation, to go into effect July 1st, which includes: 

• Issuing tickets to an autonomous vehicle 

• Submission of a “First Responder Interaction Plan” to the DMV and posting it online; plan details how law enforcement interact with the vehicle and where vehicle documents can be found

• Allow first responders access to manual vehicle override systems and establish two-way communication links with 30-second response times 

• Allow emergency services to issue geofencing zones which force AVs to leave the area within two minutes 

• Remote driving licensing requirements 

The new regulations also allow heavy-duty vehicles to test and eventually deploy on public roads, opening the door to the likes of Kodiak, Gatik etc. 

Portugal approved a decree-law allowing testing of driverless vehicles on its roads. Full legislation TBC. 

eCabs, taxi dispatch platform, expands to Bulgaria in partnership with Volt Premium Taxi. Bulgaria does not have any large ride-hailing players active in the county; that is likely to change this year, and Volt adoption of new technology signals willingness to lead the market. 

Robotaxi economics: 

1. Data from Morgan Stanley Research shows that robotaxis are much cheaper to operate than rideshare vehicles, even after factoring in depreciation, cleaning, maintenance, charging, mobile operators, insurance, and parking. Waymo at $1.36 per mile, Tesla at $0.74, while ride-hailing at $1.71.
   Yes, but: in human driven operations, these costs are transparent to ride-hailing companies, taken care by the driver; when switching to autonomous, those are felt. 

Robotaxis are the new millennial lifestyle subsidy - Sherwood News

2. Data from Obi shows that while Uber & Lyft prices dropped Q1/26 vs. Q4/25, Waymo and Tesla increased costs, with Waymo the most expensive ride-hailing option and Tesla the cheapest.
   Because: pricing isn’t necessarily directly connected to costs. Waymo is testing willingness-to-pay (WTP) models; Tesla wants to push the sentiment that autonomous vehicles are much cheaper.  

Tesla Robotaxi Prices Are Up 41% In San Francisco - Obi

#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business - a consultancy focused on Innovation, Growth and Autonomy in the Mobility industry.

Mobility Business | All Things Mobility

Innovation.
Growth.
Autonomy.

www.movingppl.com

Autonomous Shuttles, DRT & Bus-Based Mobility 🚍🚌

MAN and ADASTEC partner on autonomous buses. The first bus to pilot in Munich in the autumn of 2026, operating with a closed user group and a safety driver. Note: ADASTEC replaced Mobileye. 

The RABus project comes to a close with the publication of the final report. A EU funded project, it ran from 2020 to 2025. “In total, more than 430 test drives were carried out, more than 1,600 people were transported and around 2,100 kilometres were covered in automated mode. Speeds of up to 53 km/h were reached”. An hour for Waymo; probably even less than that 

Shotl integrates into LINE

RideCo is fumbling paratransit in Las Vegas; a month since launch, the app is not yet delivering stable operations. 

The Ultimate 2026 Mobility & Electrification Events Calendar

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kv4L4pesy0hBEbjCBDMPnhuPSGaHvqlItfup7BvRJBw/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Micromobility 🚲🛴

Forest (previously known as Human Forest) raises £27M, bringing the total raised to £40M. Forest, operating in London, supports 2 million shared-bikes rides per month and has 1.5 million users. Funds will be used to grow. OKAI, e-bike manufacturer, participated in the round. 

Voi Q1/26 financial report (last week I analysed FY25 report):

• Revenue up 38% to €36.4M

• Vehicle profit margin down one percentage point to 47.4% (was 48.4%)

• Adjusted EBIT decreased to -€8.9M (from -€7.2M)

• Cash flow from operating activities decreased to EUR -€11.1M (from -€7.1M) 

Bottom line - Voi is growing, but has yet to achieve long term profitability. 

Also Voi with a threat to leave the UK if legislation won’t be introduced by the time existing trial extension is due - May 2028. The UK has been slow to formally adopt micromobility, with Dott already leaving London back in 2024. Read more here. 

Arturs Burnins looks at the Belgium shared mobility report: 

🚲 21,721 shared bicycles | 1.45 rides per day 

🛴 18,764 shared scooters | 1.93 rides per day for the free floating fleet 

🚗 8,976 shared cars | Free-floating cars: 2h15 average rental while A-to-A (round-trip) cars: 8.4h average rental

Shared-Mobility-in-Belgium-in-2024-Report-Way-To-Go.pdf

Stephen Bee looks at the London e-bike delivery market. 

Stephen Bee

Delivery - bikes to cars, bots & drones 🍽🧺

Starship reaches 10 million deliveries. Starship is active in over 300 locations in 8 countries, operating over 3,000 delivery bots. 

Starship Technologies

Delivery Hero Q1/26 financial report - key takeaways: 

• Group GMV (Glovo, Talabat, foodpanda and many more brands) grew 8.8% YoY to €12.5 billion

• Revenue up 17.8% to €3.7 billion (29.6% of GMV)

• Quick commerce now accounting for 18% of Group GMV

Zelos targets $600M in Hong Kong IPO. Zelos operates a fleet of 25,000 robovans, mostly in China. Funds will be used to grow internationally. 

Flytrex expand partnership with Little Caesars using its new Sky2 drone - capable of delivering two large pizzas and a soda in a single flight. The new drone can carry up to 4 kg (8.8 pounds) and serve a 4 mile flight radius. 

Grupo Chedraui partners with Rappi Turbo to launch a 10-minute delivery partnership across major Mexican urban hubs. “Utilizing existing retail floor space for ultra-fast fulfillment significantly lowers CAPEX compared to the traditional 15-minute delivery model based on dedicated micro-fulfillment centers”. “Traditional…”

DoorDash adds new partners: Brookshire Grocery Company (BGC), FreshDirect, Harps Food Stores, and Market of Choice. 

Hong Kong’s Competition Commission opens public consultation on Keeta (by Meituan), regarding concerns over the company’s contractual practices with restaurants. This is the 2nd step (of two) that was agreed with Keeta back in November 2025. The 1st saw Keeta make voluntary amendments to its contractual agreements. 

AV Freight, Industrial & Logistics 🚛🚜

Bot Auto launches fully autonomous commercial operations, Ryan Transportation the customer. No safety driver, running on a 231 mile (370 km) route between Houston and Dallas. This puts Bot Auto together with Aurora and Gatik, which also operate autonomous commercial freight. 

Bot Auto Joins The On-Road Driverless Club

Pony.ai announced the mass production of its Gen-4 autonomous heavy truck, with initial cargo operations planned for later this year targeting trunk lines and ports. The company recently received China's first permit for unmanned cargo operations in autonomous truck platoons. Also Pony.ai partners with CATL to develop an autonomous light truck 

Robotaxi Cost to Drop Under 230,000 Yuan in 2027, Pony.ai Unveils First L4 Autonomous Truck | Gasgoo

Aurora expands partnership with Hirschbach Motor Lines, refrigerated truckload carrier; Hirschbach signed an MOU to buy 500 autonomous trucks, starting in 2027. Aurora operates a DaaS (Driver-as-a-Service), in which the client owns the asset and Aurora “leases” the virtual driver. 

Applied Intuition partners with Heidelberg Materials to deploy autonomous haulage systems for Heidelberg Materials' quarry operations, starting at a site in Australia.

I love meeting new people and learning about innovation in mobility. Let’s get-to-know / catch up.

Coffee chat

25 minutes get-to-know / catch-up

app.reclaim.ai/m/Barak-Sas/25min

In other news 📰

BMW i Ventures raised a new $300M fund and the investment focus of a CVC is a good indicator of where mobility is heading. On the list: agentic AI and physical AI; industrial software;  advanced materials; and manufacturing and supply chain technologies.

The curb is getting more attention. Startups such as Meter Feeder and Mapless AI are developing parking solutions for autonomous vehicles, which include validation and payment. Others are working on curbside access permissions. In NYC, a new office has been established: Office of Curb Management. SWITCH develops AI agents to influence user behavior and automate real time dispatching.

AI is used to identify road offenses. It’s doing great. 

Firestorm Labs raises $82M (total $153M) to take drone factories into the field. 

Rocsys, hands-free charging system for robotaxis, raises $13M, bringing total funding to $56 million. 

Gemini is now coming to cars, replacing the Google Assistant. I’ve got a Google Home, which has recently been upgraded to Gemini. No improvement, but the voice has changed. 

How the heck does GPS work? All you need are 4 satellites, triangulation, use of an Einstein formula and a phone.

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Alexis Jovignot is the new Directeur Innovation Groupe @ Groupe Keolis. 

Amit Frenkel is the new Vice President of Business Development @ Ondas Autonomous Systems.

Ashleigh Filtness is the new Chairperson @ Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety. 

David Brottet is the new Account Executive @ Matawan. 

John Lankford is the new VP of Global Partnerships @ Spin. 

Nir Barak is the new Sustainability Manager @ Greater Anglia. 

Scott Bradley is the new Executive Vice President @ Pioneer eMobility | e-Boost. 

Stacey van der Putten is the new Interim Chief Executive Officer @ Auckland Transport.

Congrats and good luck!

Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

#movingpeople - All Things Mobility

Subscribe here.

movingpeople.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

#movingpeople - All Things Mobility

Subscribe here.

movingpeople.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕

Lyft acquires Gett’s UK operations for $55M, as it pushes further into Europe and expands product offering. In July 2025 Lyft acquired Freenow, expanding into Europe, followed by the TBR Global Chauffeuring acquisition in October 2025, which expanded its portfolio to global chauffeuring. With the Gett acquisition, Lyft strengthens its position in London, fortifying Black Cab and B2B operations, which are also available on the Freenow platform. Gett will be rebanded as “Gett by Lyft” and its workforce will be integrated with the existing UK-based Freenow team. 

Gett, which is active in Israel and the UK, was acquired in August 2025 by an Israeli financial consortium, for $188M. The consortium retains Israeli operations. 

Lyft acquires Gett UK; expands rider offerings in London

The strange case of Uber & Hydrogen in Paris

Uber invests - via convertible loan - in HysetCo, a Paris-region company that leases hydrogen taxis and operates much of the refueling network that supports them. HysetCo owns roughly 800 vehicles today, and this deal aims to have 2,000 vehicles on-road in the next five years.

Let’s analyse this: Uber. Convertible loan. Asset heavy business. Hydrogen in cars is an inferior technology to electric. What is going on here???

First, a bit of history: In 2024 HysetCo raised €200M to scale. Back then its largest customer was Hype, a taxi business leasing and operating HysetCo’s hydrogen fleet. In mid-2025 Hype publicly broke with HysetCo, claiming the technology was expensive and not a good fit for taxis, and announced it is switching to electric. 

“HysetCo look less like a growth story and more like a fragile company trying to make difficult assets work”. I strongly advise you to read this commentary by CleanTechnica for more. In a nutshell: 

• HysetCo buys more time to grow the fleet and achieve economies of scale; to diversify from the today mostly-unfit-for-premium-taxi Toyota Mirais; and hopefully to see unit economics improve.

• Uber gets access to a business fleet in Paris. At first, 800 additional vehicles to serve B2B customers. In the long run, a better foothold in the B2B segment, regardless of HysetCo’s success in turning hydrogen into a commercial reality. This is the real incentive, not hydrogen. 

• Uber investment? Worst case scenario, if HysetCo shuts down, the convertible loan placed minus future income from interest payment. Apparently worth it to get a foothold in the Parisian corporate transport market. 

Uber Isn’t Buying Hydrogen Economics In Paris. It’s Buying Access To Business Taxi - CleanTechnica

Tesla launches robotaxi service in Dallas and Houston: 

• The good: these vehicles are fully autonomous, i.e. no human driver. In addition, Tesla “just showed up”. No dedicated mapping or extensive preparation required. Do keep in mind that Tesla uses its everyday consumer vehicles to learn new areas. 

• The bad: 2 vehicles per market. Very early days. 

• The ugly: how much does this service rely on remote driving? We don’t know. 

Robotaxi Tracker - Tesla & Waymo Fleet Dashboard

Track Tesla Robotaxi and Waymo autonomous vehicle fleets in real-time. Live wait times, fleet growth charts, vehicle spotting, and community-driven data.

Robotaxi Tracker

Uber discloses that it has a 11.52% passive stake in Lucid; recently Uber invested $300M in Lucid, whose market cap is currently circa $2.3 billion. Uber has also committed to an additional $200M, which is not representative in the existing stake. Also Uber, Nuro and Lucid begin testing premium robotaxi service in San Francisco, with a safety driver. At this point in time, only Uber employees are eligible for rides. Public launch is planned for later this year. 

Waymo barges into a crime scene yet again - this time in London. Waymo said the car was manually driven by a remote driver, and that the driver has been suspended pending an investigation.

@zonjy.media

Driverless taxi waymo driver almost hit someone and drove straigh into crime scene tape almost hit a police officer obviously driverless t... See more

There is another - very important and often mislooked - element to autonomous vehicles accidents: how humans behave with AVs un-humanly behaviour, mostly having to do with autonomous vehicles unsafe stopping. These include humans hitting Waymo’s (or others) while the AVs stopping at a stop sign or stoplight, or while yielding to a pedestrian or other vehicles. An interesting deep dive: 

Human drivers keep crashing into Waymos

Waymo's biggest mistakes happened when it stopped in the wrong place.

Kai Williams

Also Waymo plans its launch in New Orleans later this year. 

Waymo to launch in New Orleans this year - Axios New Orleans

Avride grows its autonomous fleet to 200 vehicles - placing it next to Zoox and May Mobility in terms of fleet size. Avride uses the Hyundai Ioniq 5 for its fleet, and is currently testing in Austin and Dallas, with the Dallas fleet available for robotaxi rides via the Uber platform.  

Avride’s Fleet Hits 200 Cars — and Keeps Growing - Avride - Medium

Angkas lowers driver commission from 20% to 18% - to help drivers with fuel prices. During the past weeks ride-hailing companies have been subsidising or incentivising drivers to compensate for the increasing fuel costs. The future status of the Strait of Hormuz is still unclear, with the market raising prices yet again. 

Uber partners with Flipkart, a leading Indian e-commerce company, allowing riders to use reward points (SuperCoins) on the Uber app. 

Ride Nuff is a new London-based ride-hailing player, focused on drivers. Ride Nuff charges drivers a subscription fee of £30 per week plus a flat fee of 50p per ride. This allows drivers a higher income, also allowing, to an extent, to lower prices for riders. The real challenge? Generating rider demand. Good luck.

#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business - a consultancy focused on Innovation, Growth and Autonomy in the Mobility industry.

Mobility Business | All Things Mobility

Innovation.
Growth.
Autonomy.

www.movingppl.com

Autonomous Shuttles, DRT & Bus-Based Mobility 🚍🚌

BlaBlaCar shuts down long-distance bus operations across Europe, due to lack of profitability. The company serves 300 cities in around fifteen European countries and transports roughly 6 million passengers a year - a meaningful operation. Increasing fuel, insurance and personnel costs, together with increasing competition from rail-operator SNCF, have led to the decision. BlaBlaCar will continue to focus on its asset-light car-pooling operations, which is benefitting from higher gas prices. 

Financial Report for the First Quarter 2026

This leaves FlixBus in a monopolistic position. With no IPO in sight, one has to wonder about the economics of FlixBus. 

SWVL FY25 results - the company is clawing its way backup: 

• Revenue up 41% to $24.2M

• Operating loss narrowed to $0.5M from $8.5M in FY24

• Net income $1.3M - versus net loss of $10.3M YoY

• Cash and cash equivalents: $4.41M

• Also the company regains compliance with Nasdaq listing requirements

In Sweden, an ADASTEC + Karsan self-driving electric bus completed a month of commercial passenger service in the heart of a Swedish ski resort, along a 4.8-kilometer route connecting ski areas with accommodation points. Notable: the service faced tough weather. Safety driver included. 

Beep and MOIA partner in the US, planning to scale to 5,000 vehicles in multiple markets over the next decade, with a focus on public transit. MAN gets ready to test an autonomous bus fitted with ADASTEC technology in Munich, starting in the autumn. Malta set to trial driverless buses. 

Uber Transit is budgeting $1 million in innovation funding to advance use of Uber’s on-demand transport in US transit agencies, offering each up to $50k in funding. See funding programme here. Uber has been trying to get transit agencies to use its network to complement public transport for years now, with unclear success. Perhaps this will help. 

The Ultimate 2026 Mobility & Electrification Events Calendar

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kv4L4pesy0hBEbjCBDMPnhuPSGaHvqlItfup7BvRJBw/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Micromobility 🚲🛴

Voi FY25 financial report - key takeaways: 

• Revenue, fleet and usage all up: revenue up 34% YoY to €178M, thanks to more vehicles deployed and more rides. Vehicles deployed grow to 124k in 2025 versus 92.8k in 2024; rides increase to 115.8k versus 74.6k in 2024; with trips per vehicle per day (TV) growing from 2.2 in 2024 to 2.56 in 2025. 

• Unit economics - the same: net revenue per vehicle per day grew slightly from €3.91 to €3.94 with vehicle profit growing by half a percentage point to 57.5%.

• EBIT is a negative €7.6M, compared to negative €3.3M in 2024

• While adjusted EBIT a positive €3.2M, up from essentially breakeven in 2024

• Profit before tax: negative €11.5M, an improvement from a negative €22.7M YoY

Voi is scheduled to publish its Q1/26 report on April 27, 2026 (today). To be continued in the next #movingpeople edition. 

Bird increases Canadian activity - remember it is a Canadian company now. By this summer, the company expects its fleet will number over 10,000 e-scooters and 3,000 e-bikes in more than 25 Canadian municipalities.

Delivery - bikes to cars, bots & drones 🍽🧺

Wolt and Dott partner across 8 European markets: Wolt+ subscribers get 30 minutes of free Dott ride time every month while Dott users get a free 3-month Wolt+ trial. Markets include: Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Norway, and Poland, 

In Nigeria, Swoop raises $7.3M in seed funding to take on incumbents Chowdeck, Glovo, and FoodCourt. 

Nana, Saudi grocery delivery platform, enters financial reorganisation. Since its establishment in 2016, the company has raised $208M across five funding rounds. The Saudi delivery market is highly competitive, with regional names such as Jahez (32% market share) and Rabbit next to international brands such as Careem and Keeta.

In the UK, Asda partners with Deliveroo to expand express grocery reach. 100 Asda express sites will now be delivered via Deliveroo.

AV Freight, Industrial & Logistics 🚛🚜

Humble Robotics, a new player in the autonomous electric freight industry, raises $24M in Seed funding. The differentiator: Humble is designed with an autonomous mindset, i.e. with no room for a driver (think Zoox) and no dependency on existing truck design. 

PlusAI and Churchill Capital Corp IX terminate planned SPAC. 

A&K Robotics raises $8 million CAD Series A investment. The company develops self driving vehicles fit to move people with mobility limitations in airports. 

A&K ROBOTICS

I love meeting new people and learning about innovation in mobility. Let’s get-to-know / catch up.

Coffee chat

25 minutes get-to-know / catch-up

app.reclaim.ai/m/Barak-Sas/25min

In other news 📰

Fullpath, AI-driven customer data and marketing automation platform for the automotive industry, is acquired by Cox Automotive for roughly $500M. Founded in 2013 and raising $55M in total, Fullpath serves thousands of car dealerships. 

Skydio, autonomous drones, raises $110M at a valuation of $4.4 billion. Skydio has flown over 3.6 million customer missions across 3,800 customers, and to date has delivered over 60,000 “flying robots”. 

Musk admits millions of Tesla owners need upgrades for true ‘Full Self-Driving’. All “Hardware 3” vehicles, sold between 2019 and 2023, will require a new computer and new cameras. The company plans to roll out micro-factories to be able to upgrade hardware for customers who bought FSD. 

Bolt Drive (car-share) adds 200+ new cars in Lithuania.

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Adriel Alvarez is the new B2G Business Development @ BlaBlaCar Daily. 

Enzo Lanoue is the new Chief Commercial Officer @ Sereno. 

Jennifer Christie is the new Global Enterprise Account Executive @ HubBox. 

Mustapha Jaeban is the new Senior Director, Damage & Maintenance – Europe @ Avis Budget Group.

Robert Slade is the new Recruiter (via Falzon Talent) @ Rivan Industries.

Congrats and good luck!

Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

#movingpeople - All Things Mobility

Subscribe here.

movingpeople.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

#movingpeople - All Things Mobility

Subscribe here.

movingpeople.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕

Lucid appoints new CEO (former left February 2025); subsequently raises $200M from Uber (bringing total to $500M) and an additional order of 25,000 robotaxis (total 35,000); also from Lucid’s majority owner, the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, the company is receiving $550M through convertible preferred stock. 

The FT calculated that over time Uber invested $2.5 billion in equity stakes and spent over $7.5 billion on securing robotax assets - a total of (to date) $10 billion investment in robotaxi. This makes perfect sense - Uber must assure supply. In the present, the focus is on driver recruitment and incentives; in the future, the focus will be on ensuring the car, the asset. And the best way is to partially own and pre-order.  

Also Uber employees begin Nuro & Lucid robotaxi test rides via the Uber platform in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Wayve raises an additional $60M from AMD, Arm and Qualcomm Ventures. This adds to the $1.2 billion Series D (& the $300M milestone-pending Uber investment). The big news isn’t the money - it is that three semiconductor and computing market leaders are partnering with Wayve. 

Waymo starts public commercial services in Miami and Orlando. In London, Waymo moves from manual driving to autonomous + safety driver. Waymo in the snow. 

Self-driving cars test in Truckee snow as officials cite lack of notification

Lyft, via flexdrive, is building an 80,000-square-foot (±7,500 sq. meters) autonomous depot in Nashville, for its partnership with Waymo. 

Tesla brings its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston.

Autocab, the UK-founded taxi (/minicab) dispatch app, has a new CEO - Frans Hiemstra - an Uber veteran. Why is this news? At the time, in 2020, Uber’s acquisition hit waves across the minicab industry. For many drivers and minicab company owners, this was sacrilegious. icabby seized the opportunity and grew market share. Meanwhile, Autocab did not realise its potential, not via the Local Cab platform nor by successfully expanding into Europe. Now Uber had to make a choice - either promote internally from Autocab, a move that will not create waves across the industry, or bring someone from Uber. Enter Frans. Good luck!

Driver-focused ride-hailing apps: In Ireland, Tap a Taxi is a new co-operative app by All Ireland Taxi Representatives Association.The business model is a €300 one-off fee and a monthly €120 subscription fee. 

Go taxi, Japan’s most popular taxi-hailing app, plans to IPO later this year, aiming to raise circa $400M in the process. 

Airbnb rolls out private airport transfers in 125 cities. Guests will be able to book chauffeur rides from the Airbnb app. 

#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business - a consultancy focused on Innovation, Growth and Autonomy in the Mobility industry.

Mobility Business | All Things Mobility

Innovation.
Growth.
Autonomy.

www.movingppl.com

Autonomous Shuttles, DRT & Bus-Based Mobility 🚍🚌

TPG invests $100M in student mobility company Zum at a $1.7 billion valuation, up from $1.3 billion in the previous round. Funds will be used for organic growth, but M&A isn'‘t ruled out. 

Late night autonomous bus service launches in Seoul, South Korea, on a 22.1km route. Passengers must be seated at all times, and validate their card when boarding and alighting (although the service is free). 

Swvl returns to city rides service in Cairo.

Events to watch our for (& more in the link) in the next 2 months:

The Ultimate 2026 Mobility & Electrification Events Calendar

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kv4L4pesy0hBEbjCBDMPnhuPSGaHvqlItfup7BvRJBw/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Micromobility 🚲🛴

Interview with JET’s CEO, on the journey that started in 2021 from Kazakhstan - where the company now controls 70% market share - to eight countries in Central Asia and LATAM, with Brazil growing from a GMV of $8M in 2024 to $36M in 2025. Future expansion is planned for LATAM. 

Veo expected to launch in Denver - replacing Lime and Bird. Final decision on April 27th, with rollout planned for May 1st and the existing Lime & Bird contract terminating on May 16th. Veo to pay the city $245 per permitted vehicle, with a proposed 9,000-unit fleet. 

Cyprus raises the minimum age for scooter riders from 14 to 17 - but avoids banning the service altogether. 

Delivery - bikes to cars, bots & drones 🍽🧺

Uber acquires an additional 4.5% stake in Delivery Hero for €270M, from Prosus, as Prosus is required to dilute its 27% stake in Delivery Hero following the Just Eat acquisition. Back in May 2024 Uber acquired a ±7% stake for €300M, so now Uber has circa 10%. 

Uber Eats launches “Returns” - customers will now be able to send back eligible retail items purchased on Uber Eats and receive an instant* refund. 

Uber will now pick up your returns from your doorstep | TechCrunch

AV Freight, Industrial & Logistics 🚛🚜

Caterpillar acquires Monarch Tractors’ assets. Monarch, which raised $200M since 2018, struggled to both develop the tech and to manufacture tractors, and a recent pivot into software was too little too late. This makes sense for Caterpillar, which will continue developing on the existing tech.  

Rideflux is the first Korean company to receive a permit for paid autonomous truck delivery. Freight delivery services to begin in June. 

DriveU.auto receives strategic investment from Ashdod Port to roll out autonomous terminal tractors; this follows a successful proof-of-concept. This sees DriveU’s transition from a remote driving operator to an autonomous industrial environments player. 

Wojciech Siwik on who pays for the driverless mile: 

I love meeting new people and learning about innovation in mobility. Let’s get-to-know / catch up.

Coffee chat

25 minutes get-to-know / catch-up

app.reclaim.ai/m/Barak-Sas/25min

In other news 📰

Moovit for sale. Mobileye, which holds the company, is looking to get $300-400M for Movvit, down from the $915M Mobileye paid for it six years ago. This has to do with the massive challenges MaaS has encountered, but also of the failed Moovit promise to be a part of the autonomous future. Some Moovit stats: 

• Circa 60 million monthly active users across 3,500 cities in 112 countries

• 2025 saw $39M in revenue and a net loss of $11M

Slate Auto raises $650M Series C, bringing the total to $1.4 billion. Next up: funding production of its affordable EV truck.

Glydways raises $170M Series C, bringing the total to $250M, and is rumored to be in discussions to raise an additional $250M. Glydways is an autonomous substitute for rail, operating on dedicated lanes. The company is getting ready to launch three operational pilots this year in Atlanta, New York City, and the United Arab Emirates. 

Uber AI Solutions acquires Thriving Springs AI, AI powered employee learning and engagement platform. 

World’s largest drone show - with 22,580 UAVs:

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Adam Maher is the new Commercial Account Executive @ CitySwift. 

Baptiste Gautier is the new Director - Flights Supply @ Agoda. 

Brian Caulfield is the new Director @ Trinity Centre for Transport Research. 

Conor Campbell is the new General Manager - Micromobility @ Careem. 

Erich C. Kulterer is the new Head of Operations Truck @ ONLOGIST GmbH. 

John Ioannou is the new Senior Business Growth and Development Manager @ COIL. 

José Carlos Aguilar Bojórquez is the new Marketplace Lead - SSL @ DiDi. 

Justyna Mariańska is the new Marketing Manager @ Express Car Rental.

Mike Schoofs is the new Chief Executive Officer @ TomTom. Mike has been with the company since 2005! Congrats! 

Nadav Cohen is the new Engineering PMO @ XTEND.

Olli Rissanen is the new Director, Autonomous Vehicle Expansion @ Wolt. 

Yann Bauchet is the new “Responsable des mobilités actives & alternatives” @ Transdev. 

Congrats and good luck!

Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

#movingpeople - All Things Mobility

Subscribe here.

movingpeople.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

#movingpeople - All Things Mobility

Subscribe here.

movingpeople.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕

An unusual robotaxi launch - Verne debuted its robotaxi operations, the first robotaxi operations in Europe, powered by Pony.ai and Uber, covering an area of 90 sq. km. Why unusual? The haste and the financial deadline. I’ve covered this in my previous #movingpeople edition; Verne needed to launch a service to receive EU grant money; the current service has an unknown number of vehicles and comes with a safety driver onboard. It seems more like marking territory than launching a service. 

Waymo launches in its 11th commercial city - Nashville - in partnership with Lyft. Riders will be able to book via either Waymo OR the Lyft app (soon); fleet management will be carried by flexdrive, Lyft’s subsidiary. 

Waymo out of New York - the city has not renewed autonomous permits. It was the former Mayor’s decision to approve the testing, with the new Mayor said to be against; meanwhile State legislation has not progressed to allow testing. 

Waymo now is mapping potholes and sharing the information with a Waze for Cities app. I would argue that mapping potholes is a good step forward, but that the real challenge for cities is finding the budget & resources to fix them. AI isn’t able to pour tarmac. Yet.  

In Austin, a Avride autonomous vehicle ran over and killed… a duck. The vehicle was in autonomous mode with a safety driver onboard. The local community is outraged, Avride paused testing in the area. 

2025 California DMV’s AV miles and disengagement data - key takeaways: 

• Waymo leads in miles, with 3.3 million miles, followed by Zoox with 1.2 million miles. Coming in 3rd place is Nuro - with 157k miles. The list has a name I’ve learned about for the first time: Nullmax, with 1,670 miles. 

• Zoox leads in miles per disengagements, 60,683 miles per disengagements. With no steering wheel nor pedals, it must mean remote drivers. Waymo 2nd place with 19,234 and Pony.ai 3rd at 17,748. 

• Mercedes Benz has 28 AVs in use - 4th highest after Waymo, Zoox and Nuro. 

Waymo Dominates California AV Test Data - EE Times

More on TADA’s expansion to New York: driver registration started early March; Beta expected in May; full launch in Summer. TADA’s model is a fixed-fee-per-ride, a better proposition to drivers than existing ride-hailing companies. But the real challenge is demand generation.TADA isn’t new at ride-hailing - it was established in Singapore in 2018, and to date the company recorded over 150 million rides across SE Asia. To be continued. 

In South Korea, Onda taxi members grew from 4.24 million in November 2024 to 7.95 million today. The Tmoney GO (same group) had 13 million subscribers last year, second only to Kakao and so according to their PR, in front of Uber. Bolt, pronounced “Hopp” in North America, expands into corporate travel in Canada. Belgium taxis are trying to have their own ride-hailing app, aiming for at least 10% of the market. Uklon registers autonomous brand. 

What will robotaxis change, by Bern Grush, from the WEF. 

Why people will own private autonomous cars, by Sam Lessin. I absolutely think car ownership in the autonomous era isn’t going away (albeit decreasing somewhat). 

A recent academic paper estimated that AVs will expand total miles driven by around 5% due to additional car journeys as well as robotaxi deadheading. From David Zipper. 

This week I attended the Institute for Driverless Transport (IDT) official launch. The IDT goal is to prepare policymakers, businesses, and communities for the consequences of the arrival of autonomous vehicles. Reach out to James Hutt and Tym Syrytczyk for more. 

#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business - a consultancy focused on Innovation, Growth and Autonomy in the Mobility industry.

Mobility Business | All Things Mobility

Innovation.
Growth.
Autonomy.

www.movingppl.com

Autonomous Shuttles, DRT & Bus-Based Mobility 🚍🚌

In Stavanger, Norway, ADASTEC & Karsan received approval to operate without a safety driver. This is already a commercial service, i.e. with paying passengers, one of a few limited commercial public transport services globally.   

And Karsan’s e-Atak bus with ADASTEC AV technology approved to run autonomous operations in open traffic in France, following six-month testing in Paris with public transportation operator, RATP Group, in which the vehicle drove 3,000km. 

MOIA begin testing in Los Angeles, ahead of a launch with Uber in late 2026. Mobileye supplies the AV tech; safety driver to be removed in 2027. The ID.Buzz can seat 4 passengers, making it a hybrid between a van (or microbus, as some call it in the US) and a car. Will it serve as a DRT (microtransit) or a taxi? My bet is on the latter. To be continued. 

Fetti expands to Miami. Freenow has new on-demand service in Hamburg - a feeder service to a local train station. SWVL intercity rides are back. 

Interview with Sam Ryan, Zeelo’s CEO, for Frost & Sullivan. Key takeaways: de-urbanisation, struggling public transport services and increased awareness & action from employers fuel the ‘digital commute’ market. AI supports processes, not replacing those; and autonomous vehicles pose a future opportunity.  

Events to watch our for (& more in the link) in the next months:

The Ultimate 2026 Mobility & Electrification Events Calendar

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kv4L4pesy0hBEbjCBDMPnhuPSGaHvqlItfup7BvRJBw/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Micromobility 🚲🛴

Aldin Cycles - Ghana’s first bike share service - goes electric. The company, which has 220 mechanical bikes, will now add 50 e-bikes to its fleet. 

Florence bans shared e-scooters, driven by safety concerns and the practical impossibility of enforcing Italy's new helmet requirement. Bird pivoted to private rental while it legally challenges the decision; Bit Mobility pivots to B2B. 

Belfast Bikes sees drop in rentals after price hike. 51,800 rentals were recorded between September 2025 - March 2026; down from 69,500 rentals the year before. This also might have to do with the introduction of a new operator, Beryl, which requires a new signup. 

Ryde recently expanded to Germany - read an interview with Tobias W. Balchen, Ryde’s CEO, on the German launch and managing in-house operations. 

Insurance economics by Shift Happens: rising insurance in the micromobility segment is a strain on companies, with an estimated cost of $0.05 and $0.20 per ride. The solution? Use tech that prevents accidents (and prove that to insurers).

Delivery - bikes to cars, bots & drones 🍽🧺

Just Eat and Starship Technologies launch delivery robots in Barnsley, serving an area of 11,000 households. 

GO Bots unmanned delivery vehicles launch in Belgium.

IndiGOtech

AV Freight, Industrial & Logistics 🚛🚜

EasyMile confirms strategic pivot - becoming a technology supplier for autonomous heavy-duty vehicles. Much like Oxa and Aurrigo before, EasyMile will now focus on airports and industrial logistics. These companies (& Navya) designed the very first autonomous shuttles - which with the rapid introduction of robotaxis and the takeup of autonomous robovans and buses - became obsolete. The pivot to operational domains answers a need in the market; the company has over 10 airports and over 15 logistics sites in which it operates. 

Mariana Minerals develops MineOS - a software first approach to mining. The company partnered with Pronto, off-road autonomous vehicles. The goal - digitising and automating everything that has to do with the mining process. 

Wojciech Siwik focuses on system readiness - it’s not only the tech, but the business proposition to the client (aka freight / fleet operator) 

I love meeting new people and learning about innovation in mobility. Let’s get-to-know / catch up.

Coffee chat

25 minutes get-to-know / catch-up

app.reclaim.ai/m/Barak-Sas/25min

In other news 📰

Zenzic, UK’s Connected and Automated Mobility (CAM) ecosystem, announces the eight projects it will fund to explore how autonomous vehicles could benefit businesses and communities. Amongst them studies of commercial & operational viability of AVs in airports, in private-hire operations, of HGVs and of yard tractors. 

Tracsis acquires Vesputi, German ticketing company. The deal sees Tracsis paying up to €8.2M, pending KPIs.  

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Arvin Minocha is the new Principal & SVP Global Partnerships @ aetherEV. 

Cengiz Rahmioglu is the new Regional General Manager, Grocery & Retail, Central & Southern Europe @ Wolt. 

Chris Urban is the new Senior Director, Retail - Northern Europe @ Wolt. 

Ciarán Kelly is the new Head of Supply Product @ CMAC Group. 

Elin Kristin Skjølsvold is the new Regional Commercial Lead (WM), North @ Wolt. 

Mathieu Kury is the new Operations Programs @ ALSO.

Maria Burpee is the new Venture Partner @ Transatlantic Highway Ventures.

RJ Schmidt is the new Field Support Operations Launch Lead @ Uber. 

Syed Mohsin is the new Global Facility Manager @ Wolt.

Congrats and good luck!

Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

#movingpeople - All Things Mobility

Subscribe here.

movingpeople.beehiiv.com/subscribe

This week highlighting two US events and one European event: 

Ride AI, San Francisco, 15 April, brings together autonomous vehicle pioneers, regulators, and AI experts to focus on the next big challenge: marketing autonomous vehicles into mainstream adoption. This link gives you a discounted ticket. 

Curbivore, Los Angeles, 16-17 April, is an Autonomy, Delivery & Mobility event, with speakers from Uber, Instacart, DoorDash, Starship and over 1,000 participants. Use this link or make sure you enter MP50 for a 50% discount. 

ATOM Connect, Riga, Latvia, 14 May, is a shared mobility event, with both speaking and workshop sessions. Register interest here. 

For all mobility and autonomy events:

The Ultimate 2026 Mobility & Electrification Events Calendar

Google Docs

Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕

Baidu experienced a ‘system failure’ which caused over 100 vehicles in Wuhan to suddenly freeze on the spot. Baidu is not commenting on what happened; and while social media recorded several accidents, official public sources claim that there were none. One shouldn't expect much transparency from the Chinese; but also not from US companies - for example they lack transparency over everything remote driving. Europe must make sure that the robotaxi roll out has regulators and the public better informed. 

Twitter tweet

Uber acquires Blacklane, the global Chauffeur ride-hailing solution. Blacklane, founded in 2011, operates in over 500 cities across 60 countries. Deal numbers were not shared, but I’ve heard it is in the €900M region, which would make sense, seeing the company was valued circa €500M back in 2024, and that Uber needs this acquisition to better position in the premium mobility space, More here. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year. 

Reports of Uber looking to buy a controlling stake in Kakao Mobility, the >90% market share ride-hailing solution in South Korea. Roughly a third of Kakao Mobility is held by different investors, but for Uber to gain a controlling stake, Kakao itself would have to agree to sell. That is not very likely.

Last week we learned that Verne partnered with Uber and Pony.ai using BAIC vehicles to launch robotaxi operation in Zagreb, Croatia; the Verne vision was always for the company to develop their own platform - owning the demand generation (ride-hailing app), running fleet operations and manufacturing their own eclectic vehicle, while relaying on Mobileye for the tech. That is not the news - so what happened? Tamas GABOR tells a story of a marriage of convenience; true or not, the key takeaways for me are: 

1. By partnering with Uber, Verne has forfeited its own demand generation; this might have to do with funds invested by Uber. Once you partner with Uber on demand, there is no going back. 

2. Mobileye’s fully autonomous performance is questionable. It was supposed to launch with Verne; and was not shortlisted for the London launch by any player.

3. Moving forward, Verne will focus on fleet operations (short term) and vehicle manufacturing (longer term), perhaps with Pony.ai as a partner.  

Waymo: (1) believes in a future that has an autonomous personal car; (2) getting ready to launch in Tokyo in the “in a few months” with taxi operator Nihon Kotsu and mobility (taxi-hailing) platform GO; (3) starts operations at the San Antonio Airport; (4) and also in San Antonio, caught driving the wrong way in a school zone. For some reasons - we don’t know why, cough, transparency - Waymo keeps messing up near schools. 

Tesla admits to using remote drivers: "​​As a redundancy measure in rare cases … [remote assistance operators] are authorized to temporarily assume direct vehicle control as the final escalation maneuver after all other available intervention actions have been exhausted”. Tesla’s remote drivers can drive at up to 10mph (16 km/h).

Namma Yatri’s parent company, Moving Tech Innovations, acquires Dutch company Automicle, its first international acquisition. Automicle is a MaaS and digital parking company; the company raised circa $106k over the years and has 5 employees. The way I read it - Moving Tech will implement Automicle’s tech in India, expanding its Indian portfolio. 

GM moving toward eyes-off driving. Soon, over 200 vehicles will begin supervised testing and collect data on public highways in California and Michigan. L3 ready vehicles are expected in 2028. 

Pony.ai delivered an initial batch of more than 100 seventh-generation (Gen-7) robotaxis to Guangzhou Chenqi Mobility Technology - to operate on Chenqi’s ride-hailing platform. Pony’s business model: licensing the tech. CaoCao removes safety drivers in Hangzhou. CaoCao, the ride-hailing subsidiary of Geely, has over 100 autonomous vehicles in the city. Kazakhstan prepares to introduce driverless taxis with Yandex (AV-tech) and inDrive (demand platform) by the end of 2026. WeRide and Uber launch commercial robotaxi service in Dubai. Trials started in December 2025, and now move to ‘fully’ driverless. Also WeRide and Grab officially launch Singapore's first autonomous public ride service in Punggol. In Hungary, Mobileye + Zeekr are testing L4 on public roads. Turing Drive eyes Japan expansion. 

Upshift partners with Elmo to bring remote control car subscriptions to California. 

Uklon launches Uklon Travel - a new service that enables users to purchase bus tickets for intercity and international routes directly within the Uklon app. Uber launches in Mauritius, working with Logidis, a local taxi company. Singapore-founded TADA is expanding to New York with a zero-commission model. In Uganda, SafeBoda launches a corporate transport solution. Yango expands to delivery in Cameroon. Yango adds public transport options in Pakistan. InDrive grows in the Philippines. Maxim received official operating approval from the Malaysian authorities. Uber Golf. Cabify is the new sponsor for Valencia FC; recently Uber sponsored Barcelona. After losing two potential titles, I am breathless as I wait for the next seven Arsenal Premier league games. 

The path to Waymo’s 500k rides: 

Waymo’s skyrocketing ridership in one chart | TechCrunch

#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business - a consultancy focused on Innovation, Growth and Autonomy in the Mobility industry.

Mobility Business | All Things Mobility

Innovation.
Growth.
Autonomy.

www.movingppl.com

Autonomous Shuttles, DRT & Bus-Based Mobility 🚍🚌

Zoox brings its robotaxis to Austin and Miami after almost two years of operating its test vehicles in those cities. These locations add to the existing Las Vegas and San Francisco operations. Zoox is custom built for autonomy - i.e. no steering wheel nor pedals - which means that in order to launch commercial services the company requires additional government exemptions. 

Aicha Evans

VDL ETS is exploring remote driving for buses (video inside). This doesn't sound right to me - driving a bus in urban environments is far too complicated for a remote driver; depots don’t need remote drivers; this leaves intercity work, which might be feasible on-ground but financial viability is limited as those buses do travel in the city to pick up passengers. 

Singapore to begin a trial of driverless buses on two public routes. The autonomous buses are jointly produced by technology firms MKX Technologies and Zhidao Network Technology (Beijing) with electric vehicle manufacturer BYD.

I rode the Cambridge Connector autonomous bus powered by Fusion Processing and Alexander Dennis. To make autonomous public transport financially viable you need to take the driver out. We all know that, so what’s stopping us?

1. People (or riders) - this is the hardest challenge 

2. Regulation

3. Road infrastructure 

For more on the challenges, solution and the ride itself: 

Riding the Cambridge Connector (or how do we) Commercialise Autonomous Buses

www.linkedin.com/pulse/riding-cambridge-connector-how-do-we-commercialise-autonomous-sas-t2g7e

Micromobility 🚲🛴

Also, the Rivian spinoff, partners with DoorDash to develop autonomous delivery vehicles. The deal includes a $200M investment from DoorDash, which brings the total raised to $305M and to a valuation of $1 billion. 

Svišť, Slovak shared micromobility, acquires bondi, Dutch shared micromobility and multi-modal player. bondi operates in 8 Dutch cities and has 100,000 registered riders. Svišť’s long term play is expanding into Western Europe. 

Dott is rolling out 45,000 new e-bikes (13k) and e-scooters (32k) across Europe. Dott’s CEO: “They’re more comfortable for riders and, with better availability, they’ll generate more demand. On the operational side, they’re easier for our teams to operate with 2x the battery capacity, reducing operations and charging costs”.

Delivery - bikes to cars, bots & drones 🍽🧺

Manna Air Delivery completes a $50M Series B raise, bringing the total raised to $110M. Funds will be used for massive growth - 400 new jobs, 300 in Ireland and 100 in the US, adding to the existing workforce of 170 people. 

Just a couple weeks ago Zipline raised another $200M, bringing the Series H round to $800M in total. Funds will be used to expand in the US. In related news, Wing and Walmart expand in Atlanta. 

Delivery bots vandalized in Sheffield, UK and in Philadelphia, US. Is it because they are taking space on the street? Taking jobs away from people? Carry cameras that challenge privacy? Maybe just human aggression? All of the above and probably more reasons - yet the space between humans and robots is going to vastly change over the next decade. 

Avride launches delivery bots at Salisbury University, achieving over 4.600 orders since the launch in February. 

Prosus considering selling 10% stake in Delivery Hero to Aspex, investment managers. Prosus currently holds 26.8% stake in Delivery Hero; Aspex 9.2%. A sale would make Aspex the largest shareholder, replacing Prosus. 

China is looking to stop the delivery price wars; these have negatively affected the profits of the likes of Meituan and JD.com.  

Wonder hires CFO ahead of a potential 2027 IPO. Just Eat among firms investigated in fake reviews probe by the UK's competition watchdog. Lack of trust and loyalty - What Ghost Kitchens Got Wrong - a super interesting read by Andrew Miller. 

AV Freight, Industrial & Logistics 🚛🚜

The Traton Group and Applied Intuition announced Traton One OS, a unified SDV platform that will be utilised across Traton’s four brands: Scania, MAN, International and Volkswagen Truck & Bus. In other news, International (OEM), Ryder (customer), and Plus (AV Tech) begin daily operations along a 600-mile route in Texas. 

Mars Auto, a Korean self-driving truck start-up, transported 3,379km of self-driving cargo from the west to the east of the United States in three days. This is a pilot. Einride gains Texas road approval for autonomous freight - its 5th US state. 

Equipment Finance News

I love meeting new people and learning about innovation in mobility. Let’s get-to-know / catch up.

Coffee chat

25 minutes get-to-know / catch-up

app.reclaim.ai/m/Barak-Sas/25min

In other news 📰

Rivian unlocks another $1 billion from Volkswagen. 

No Traffic, traffic signal management, raises $90M, bringing the total raised to $165M. Per the company, it holds 10% of the US public transport agencies market, circa 450 clients. 

Google partners with the UK’s Department for Transport (DfT) on the DfT’s new "Better Connected" strategy - integrating real-time bus information into Google Maps for services across England. 

eVTOL startup AIR secures $1 billion in orders for personal aircraft from 3,300 customers (on average, $300k a unit). FAA approval and serial production are expected later this year. Meanwhile - Vertical Aerospace is short for cash. 

Fraction, self-driving system for last-mile logistics, shuts down. Per founder: “growth was ultimately constrained by funding, vehicle availability, and supply chain realities in this market” and also “there is still enormous potential with visionary light EV partners in Asia and Europe”. 

Ain McKendrick

Toyota’s Woven Capital appoints new CIO and COO in push for finding the ‘future of mobility’. 

Global Public Transit Index by Mosaiq: 

Mosaiq Global Public Transit Index | Insights & Benchmarks

Crush test dummies are built with only men in mind - this means that women are 73% more likely to be severely injured in vehicle crashes than men, and 17% more likely to die. A must see 9 minute video. This needs to be fixed ASAP. 

Video: Opinion | Buckle Up, Women. Cars Still Aren’t Built for You.

For over half a century, car safety standards have left women’s lives in the rearview.

www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000010530016/car-safety-women-crash-dummies.html?smid=url-share

NGV Talent's US-focused "AV Industry Talent Demand Report" is a great way to describe the state of autonomy in 2026: 

1) Rapid growth: demand increased from 1,385 roles in 2025 to 3,021 in 2026

2) On-ground expansion: operational roles represent over 30% of total hiring + hiring locations increasing from 65 to 101 

3) Multiple companies: hiring isn't reserved for only a few companies - just look at Dallas!

Talent Demand Report 2026 - NGV Talent

Get the insights you need to hire, train, and build for the next wave of autonomous mobility.

NGV Talent

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Allan Teder is the new Director of Driver Operations @ Uber. 

Amy Hinsliff-Smith is the new Global CL Innovation Culture Leader @ CEVA Logistics. 

Halil Şentürk is the new Senior Transportation Planner @ Arup. 

Josh Martin is the new Senior Manager - Business Development @ The Go-Ahead Group. 

Justin Ben-Nathan is the new Business Development Executive @ PartsPlus. 

Matthew Thomas is the new Chief of Staff @ Veezu. 

Richard Hannah is the new Chief Executive Officer @ Neuron Mobility. 

Steve Longman is the new Autonomous Vehicles - Transport Solutions Manager @ Motability Foundation.

Suzanne Tennant is the new Head of Content and Marketing Strategy @ Oxa. 

Tim Pockney is the new Senior Marketing Communications Lead @ Zenzic. 

Timofei Maksimenko is the new Technical Project Manager @ Yandex. 

Zacharie Chebance is the new Presale Engineer Manager @ Optibus. 

Congrats and good luck!

Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

#movingpeople - All Things Mobility

Subscribe here.

movingpeople.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Last week I visited the Cambridge Connector, an autonomous bus trial powered by Fusion Processing and Alexander Dennis (ADL), running a 20 minutes fixed route between a local Park & Ride and a business park. 

The ride was OK (more on this later) - but top of mind for me was how do we commercialise autonomous buses. Daniel Clarke, Head of Technology and Innovation at the Greater Cambridge Partnership, explained that past and existing Connector trials focused on validating the tech and use cases; the next Pathfinder (/UK government) grant, planned to begin in September 2026 and continue for two years, will explore commercialisation. 

Autonomous buses bring many advantages: No driver means lower operating costs and extended work hours, including nights and weekends; higher utilisation equals better service, bringing societal advantages; there are also lower maintenance and energy costs brought on by efficient driving, Fusion & ADL quoted 7% savings; add to that potential safety advantages. 

Cities & governments could benefit from these advantages - by either ‘just’ saving money or by operating more services, in places where it wasn’t profitable enough to operate before. For example, the existing Cambridge route was chosen BECAUSE it wasn’t profitable and therefore wasn’t served, although it connects a Park & Ride to a business park. A societal justification (take cars off the road) takes place.  

Yet global adoption of autonomous buses has been slow. A vicious cycle exists: with extremely very few public transport authorities (PTAs) willing to budget scaled autonomous bus operations, public operators are not buying in; this in turn makes it hard for tech companies in the field - such as Fusion, Imagry and ADASTEC, to raise funds and finance product development. And this, in turn, makes the solution less attractive to PTAs…

Global commercialisation of autonomous buses has been limited; see my June 2025 article for places who have been able to commercialise: 

Commercial autonomy is also buses, not just cars

A #movingpeople special

#movingpeople • Barak Sas

To commercialise autonomous buses we need to take the driver out. What’s stopping us? 

1) People, or riders. Taking the driver away generates new challenges, such as ensuring the safety of elderly people who take time to board the bus and take their seat; offering a ramp for disabled people; and facing anti-social behaviour and sexual harassment concerns. By design, public transport is aimed at serving all, especially vulnerable people, which means taking the driver out isn’t so simple. In addition, there is the issue of revenue protection - how can we be sure people are paying? 

2) Regulation. In the UK, the law mandates a safety driver on public roads; Jim Hutchinson, Fusion Processing's CEO, tells me they expect this to change by H2/2027. Until then the driver cannot be taken out, hence no commercial viability. I brought the UK as an example - but each of you think for yourself - “does my country allow driverless bus operations?”

3) Road Infrastructure is not ready. Autonomous buses cannot break the rules (yet), and this leads to hindering response to edge cases. A sharp turn in which the bus needs to slightly cross a white line to pass becomes impossible for an autonomous bus. Cyclists require 1.5 meter distance from behind, but that means that sometimes autonomous buses could be stuck for long periods of time unable to pass, with incoming traffic on the other lane. There are many use cases we never even think about, because human drivers solve those instinctively. Those come to life in trials. 

Without solving the above (& probably other) challenges - commercialised operations will remain a distant future. There are some solutions: 

Tech maturity is not slowing the adoption & commercialisation of autonomous buses. This has to do with buses operating on fixed routes, i.e. limited ODDs, which makes it easier for autonomous technologies to prepare for. Of those many routes, some are simpler than others, which means PTA/Os can gradually implement an autonomous service on a per-route basis. This helps to solve challenge #3 above. 

“Not one ‘driver’ size fits all”: different communities and different routes can have different solutions - some services will be fully autonomous, while others could have a staff member onboard to assist passengers, either fully onboard or only at specific times. For example, a service can run autonomously during the day, and transition to include a staff member (not a driver) at night. The level of remote interference can also vary, from a centralised control centre based in a different city, to multiple ‘rider-assistance stations’ throughout the city, aimed at supporting riders at short notice. This mitigates - not fully solves - the challenges raised in #1 above. 

#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business - a consultancy focused on Innovation, Growth and Autonomy in the Mobility industry.

Mobility Business | All Things Mobility

Innovation. Autonomy. Growth.

Mobility Business

The ride: it was OK. 

1. Reasonably boring. Ask anyone in autonomy, the story repeats itself: whenever people get on an autonomous bus, they're excited, taking pictures, looking at this 8th wonder. Fast forward 5 minutes later, everyone is on social media, not minding the bus. Autonomy is good enough for people to not care about it. 

2. Not 100% autonomous throughout the route. There are two parts of the route in which the driver is designed to take control - one is a S-bend that requires briefly crossing a white line; the other a tight corner with visibility limitations. By current safety design, the bus just isn’t able to complete autonomously. You may ask yourself why then this route was chosen? Well, human drivers manage those two parts intuitively without a worry, so it didn't surface when the route planning took place. To Fusion’s defence - route design was determined before they entered the consortium. 

3. Cyclists cause trouble. During the ride I noticed that when encountering a cyclist on the road, the driver immediately took control. It turns out that this doesn’t happen every time, only when there is incoming traffic (such as was the case). The reason is that in autonomous mode and with incoming traffic, the bus may find itself stuck behind a cyclist for long, as it must obey the 1.5 meter distance from the cyclist at all times. See point #3 on road infrastructure. 

4. Hard breaks every now and then. There were several instances during the ride; Jim Hutchinson tells me that this is a known issue and that they are working to fix this. 

Thank you to Daniel Clarke and Jim Hutchinson (mentioned in the post) and also to Jamie Wilson, Head of Concepts & Advanced Engineering, and Stefan Baguette, Group Marketing Communications Manager, both from Alexander Dennis. 

For more on the ride you can read: 

Neil Kennett from Cars Of The Future shared the ride with me and lived to write about it: https://carsofthefuture.co.uk/uk-self-driving-enviro100aev-bus/ 

Roger French took the bus on March 5th, and was much more impressed than he is with DRT: https://busandtrainuser.com/2026/03/05/more-autonomous-bus-travels-in-cambridge/

Like what you’re reading? Please share #movingpeople with your friends & colleagues. Every like and share matters. And if you’re not already a subscriber, now it the time to join:

#movingpeople - All Things Mobility

Subscribe here.

movingpeople.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

#movingpeople - All Things Mobility

Subscribe here.

movingpeople.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Nvidia is commoditising autonomy.

A slew of autonomous partnership announcements came from Nvidia last week - without going into the details, let’s go over the high level / strategic meaning:

If you take one thing away from this: Nvidia is commoditising autonomy. You can think of it as the Android or Intel-inside of autonomous driving. 

1. Nvidia is building an autonomous technology platform, which includes sensor architecture, safety & simulation tools, cybersecurity, and an autonomous driving engine. Everything you need to develop autonomous driving. 

2. The platform does not (yet?) fully replace the likes of Waymo and Baidu, which are still needed for large scale L4 driving (I like the analogy of Waymo being a driver, and Nvidia the driving school), but

3. It lowers the barrier of entry - making it simpler for existing and new entrants to be a part of the AV landscape, either OEMs by getting their cars ready for autonomy (BYD, Geely, Isuzu and Nissan all signed up) and by enabling tech players to build on top of the Nvidia platform. WeRide and Kodiak are using Nvidia as infrastructure, and you can expect that new players will enter as technology advances and barriers lower. 

4. The platform will accelerate AV deployment - simply because Nvidia is building a ready platform for OEMs and AV Tech players to build on. For example. Uber and Bolt are using the platform to speed deployments. 

Augustin Friedel

Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕

In the autonomous race Uber has two complementary supply strategies to limit AV-tech suppliers' power: (1) by partnering with everything that moves, Uber increasing supply availability; and (2) by creating their own supply. This was the case with the Nuro-Lucid 20,000 vehicle deal, and is evident again in the Rivian 50,000 vehicle deal: 

Uber partners with Rivian to purchase 10,000 fully autonomous R2 SUV robotaxis by 2028, with an option to purchase 40,000 more in the future, targeting 25 cities in the U.S., Canada, and Europe by the end of 2031. The fleet, obviously, will be exclusive to the Uber network. 

The deal is not without its trouble - the R2 has not yet started production (which is planned for June), and also the production line itself is under construction. Furthermore, Rivian has never deployed a robotaxi. From 0 to 10,000, as they say. 

The deal sees Uber investing $300M now and up to $1.25 billion in Rivian, pending deal milestones. That - investing in companies Uber partners with - is also a part of Uber’s strategy, to ‘keep tabs’ on everything in mobility. 

For a map of Uber’s acquisitions, investments and partnerships, illustrating the reach Uber has in “All Things Mobility”. 

Jason Saltzman

WeRide enters Slovakia, the company's 4th European market, after France, Belgium and Switzerland. The roll out, planned to begin in mid-2026, will see WeRide introducing its wide portfolio: robotaxi, robovan, robobus and robosweeper. 

Kakao launches autonomous taxi service in Gangnam, South Korea, using ITS OWN proprietary autonomous driving technology. The service, operating weekdays from 10pm to 5am, is free for the first month. Kakao is currently in a hiring push for autonomous / AI engineers. 

MOIA publicly “PR” launches in the US. In early 2025 the company partnered with Uber to launch a commercial ‘human-driven’ service in Los Angeles planned to begin in late 2026, with an autonomous service expected in 2027. By the timing of this specific PR, it seems the plan is on track. 

Bolt is initiating an “Autonomous Fleet Alliance”, bringing fleet operators, AV-Tech companies and OEMs into the mix. The strategy makes sense: assure the presence of fleet operators required for launch in multiple cities. Watch this space. 

Avis is growing its autonomous fleet operations team - hiring a new lead and people in Dallas, where it partnered with Waymo. 

DiDi reports on Q4/25: 

• Revenue up 10.5% to ±$8.5 billion (58.4 billion yuan)

• Revenue ​from Didi's China Mobility segment, its core business, increased ​9% to ±$7.5 billion (51.7 billion yuan)

• International revenue up 47% to ±$640M (4.4 billion yuan); Int’l revenue make roughly 7.5% of total revenue

• Net loss of $43.5M (300 million ​yuan, versus 1.3 billion yuan YoY), as the company continues its push into Latin America. 

InDrive in 2025: revenue up 31% to $600M & more: 

In Algeria, Yassir acquires Paris-based adtech company Kawarizmi as part of its strategy to build an integrated retail media and advertising ecosystem. Cabify partners with Incognia for fraud prevention. In Kenya, the government is considering price-setting for ride-hailing (the same as taxis). In Wiltshire, UK, since the start of the pandemic, the number of licensed drivers has fallen by 21%, with many leaving for delivery jobs. Enter Uber. In London, Gett wins Royal Albert Hall. In Helsinki, Bolt launches a “Women for Women” category - enabling women passengers the opportunity to request a female driver. In Namibia, Yango is working with the government to approve drivers - the platform currently has 296 ‘licensed’ drivers In Punjab, India, Yango receives operator license.  Wheely, chauffeur service, expands to the US. “Time to Zig”. CGD Taxi rebrands as “Zig by ComfortDelGro”. A hug shifts from the formerly known ComfortDelGro Taxi and CDG Zig. In the US, the NHTSA announces it will reduce regulations for autonomous vehicles - prepare for easier regulation on taking the wheel and pedals away and for national regulation.

A lot going on in autonomy. This is the best map to track it all. Initiated by Jackson Lester, since he joined Waymo it is maintained by UC Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies.

AV Map - Autonomous Vehicle Service Areas & Robotaxi Coverage Map

Interactive map of autonomous vehicle deployments worldwide. Track Waymo, Tesla, Zoox, Apollo Go, WeRide, Nuro, Uber, Lyft robotaxi service areas and coverage zones.

#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business - a consultancy focused on Innovation, Growth and Autonomy in the Mobility industry.

Mobility Business | All Things Mobility

Innovation.
Growth.
Autonomy.

www.movingppl.com

Autonomous Shuttles, DRT & Bus-Based Mobility 🚍🚌

BusRight, school bus routing and technology startup, raised more than $30M. 

Tier IV and Isuzu launch L4 autonomous buses built on the Nvidia DRIVE Hyperion computing platform.

Events to watch our for:

The Ultimate 2026 Mobility & Electrification Events Calendar

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kv4L4pesy0hBEbjCBDMPnhuPSGaHvqlItfup7BvRJBw/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Car Sharing/renting 🚗

GreenMobility FY2025 financial report, key takeaways: 

• Revenue up 20% to ±$23.9M (DKK 153.9 million)

• EBITDA up 57% to ±$8.4M (DKK 54.0 million); EBITDA margin of 35.1% vs. 26.9% in 2024

• Operating Profit: ±$4M (DKK 26.2 million, vs. DKK 10.6 million in 2024)

• Net profit for the year: ±$3.84M (DKK 33.2 million vs. a loss of DKK 18.6 million in 2024)

• For 2026, the company expects revenue growth of 8-12% and EBITDA growth of 12-16%

SOCAR expands premium car-sharing service 'Black Label'.

Micromobility 🚲🛴

Nextbike reports 32% increase in 2025 revenue, to €82.2M (from €62.2M). The company has >115,000 bikes in >400 cities in >20 countries. Plans for 2026 include expansion in Germany, Poland and Spain, with public transport integration as a key focus.

Dat Bike, electric motorbike maker, raises $4M to expand production and distribution. 

The UK receives the new Lime bike and London Centric has an edition on the “Lime Bike Leg”. 

Leeds joins the UK’s national e-scooter trial programme, with Berylintroducing a fleet of 100 e-scooters, expanding on its existing LNER Beryl Bike scheme that has operated in the city since 2023.

Delivery - bikes to cars, bots & drones 🍽🧺

Grab acquires Delivery Hero’s foodpanda delivery business in Taiwan in cash for $600M. This marks Grab’s entry into their 9th market, and the first full-scale footprint outside Southeast Asia.

Amazon acquires Zurich-based Rivr, maker of a stair-climbing delivery robot. You might recognise this robot; it featured on the cover of #movingpeople a month ago, when the company launched a UK pilot with Just Eat. No details on the deal; back in 2024 the company was valued at $100M. Also Amazon adds 1-hour and 3-hour delivery options in the US.

Eternal infuses ±$48M (Rs 450 crore) into Blinkit amid intensifying quick commerce battle. Funds will be used to increase dark store count to 3,000 by March 2027, from circa 2,000 stores today.

AV Freight, Industrial & Logistics 🚛🚜

Kodiak expanded commercial autonomous freight operations to the Dallas <> El Paso corridor, a 600+ mile route. 

Michael Wiesinger

Einride signs MOU to establish a testbed corridor for autonomous freight operations in Texas. 

GXO partners with KION to pilot autonomous vehicles in warehouse operations. 

BringAuto autonomous sweeper. 

BringAuto

I love meeting new people and learning about innovation in mobility. Let’s get-to-know / catch up.

Coffee chat

25 minutes get-to-know / catch-up

app.reclaim.ai/m/Barak-Sas/25min

In other news 📰

In Singapore, CDG raises prices as fuel prices go up. In Australia, DiDi raises prices as fuel prices go up. This has to do with the closing of the Strait of Hormuz - and I bring you two charts on that: 

Tanker Traffic In The Strait Of Hormuz: 

Trump urges allies to help reopen Strait of Hormuz as tanker traffic nearly vanishes - Sherwood News

Price of gasoline in the USA: 

The Gasoline Price Tipping Point - by Glenn Mercer

Rivian spinout Mind Robotics, industrial robotics, is valued at $2 billion in Series A funding round. The unit, focusing on traditional robot design (not humanoids) was spun out of Rivian back in November. 

Advanced Navigation, an Australian startup developing navigation and autonomous systems, raised $110M. 

Arc Boat Company, US electric boat startup, raised $50M. 

Uber Boat expands its UK footprint with the circa $15M acquisition of The Portsmouth Harbour Ferry Company. 

Zenobē acquired Revolv, a San Francisco-based fleet charging startup, for an undisclosed amount. 

Havoc, all domain collaborative autonomy - sea, air & land, acquires heavy-lift drone-maker Mavrik and industrial vehicle autonomy startup Teleo. 

DoorDash launches ‘Tasks’ - an AI learning app, that pays couriers to submit videos to train the AI. For example, washing dishes. 

Times are a changing. The MaaS Alliance is reborn as the Mobility Alliance, building a neutral platform for collaboration with an extended focus that covers transport authorities, operators, technology providers, mobility service providers, and research institutions.

Mobility Alliance

mobility-alliance.org

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Andy Tipping is the new Director of Vehicle Integration @ Wrightbus. 

Conrad Richardson is the new Principal Consultant – Asia-Pacific @ PTV Group. 

Erwin Coffy is the new VP Business - Country Head France & Global Marketplace Performance @ BlaBlaCar. 

Heather Salem is the new Director, Grants, Billing, and Project Controls @ San Mateo County Transit District.

Jan Eller is the new Director Strategy @ Via. 

Maria Luiza Niculescu-Aron is promoted Senior General Manager @ Bolt. 

Murielle Osias is the new Head of Business Development Transport - Europe @ Ardent. 

Tim Aylen is the new Business Development Manager @ Optimo Energy.

Congrats and good luck!

Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

#movingpeople - All Things Mobility

Subscribe here.

movingpeople.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Attention: the way #movingpeople reaches your inbox is about to change. 
Today, the email sender is “Barak Sas”, that’s me. Soon, the sender is going to become #movingpeople. I am giving advance notice, change will occur toward the end of March. 

Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

#movingpeople - All Things Mobility

Subscribe here.

movingpeople.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Uber Everywhere: Motional + Zoox + Wayve & Nissan + Elite + Women + AV Insurance

New partnerships and plays from (and with) Uber dominated the mobility & autonomy industry this week. As a way to highlight Uber’s role - this week Uber is featured in its own section. 

Uber partners with Motional to launch robotaxis in Las Vegas. Riders can be matched with Motional’s robotaxis if they request UberX, Uber Electric or Uber Comfort, at no extra cost. For now, safety driver included. Interestingly, press releases included reference to the 2022 10-year framework agreement between the two companies, which was paused in 2024 due to Motional’s restructuring and (back then) defocusing on commercial operations. The mentioning implies that the agreement is back on track.

Uber partners with Zoox to add Zoox’s robotaxis to Uber’s network, beginning with Las Vegas this summer. This is the first time Zoox partners with a 3rd party demand platform; Zoox will keep its own app. 

Uber, Wayve and Nissan collaborate on robotaxis in Japan. The companies aim to launch a pilot in Tokyo toward the end of 2026, using the Nissan Leaf vehicle, Wayve AV-tech and Uber booking platform. Wayve has been testing in Japan since early 2025. 

Uber introduces Uber Elite - its new luxury vehicles + chauffeur drivers ride category. The chauffeur category is on fire (I wrote about it 4 months ago): 

• Uber launched Elite after ‘taking’ a senior leader from Blacklane 

• Lyft acquired TBD Global Chauffeuring for £83M (+$110M) back in October 2025

• Around that time, Bolt launched its own Chauffeur ride category, in London and elsewhere 

Why are ride-hailings taking on Blacklane, the category market leader? Chauffeur is (1) the only remaining category in ride-hailing not currently addressed by ride-hailiers; (2) is an important corporate proposition; and (3) represents a high margin revenue opportunity. 

Uber Elite is live in Los Angeles and San Francisco and will soon launch in NYC; vehicles include the Cadillac Escalade, Lucid Air and Lincoln Navigator; and each ride includes complimentary amenities such as chargers, bottled water, mints, and hand-sanitizing towelettes.

Uber expands women preferences across the US, enabling women riders to match with women drivers across the U.S. Women Preferences allows to set preference to women drivers and also to pre-book & request on-demand women drivers. The option is also extended to Uber Teens. Launched as a pilot in the US in August 2025, the feature is now being expanded to 60 cities. 

Marsh Risk and Apollo launch Insurance Facility to support Uber’s autonomous vehicle expansion. The Autonomous Vehicle Insurance Program (AVIP) includes technology developers, fleet operators, vehicle manufacturers and owners, as well as original equipment manufacturers involved in the development and operation of driverless ride-hailing and delivery services.

Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕

Rapido is in the midst of a financing round that will add ±$600M to its war chest .The round, valuing the company at $3 billion, is led by Prosus. According to intelligence platform Sensor Tower, Rapido had 74 million monthly active users in Jan.-Feb. 2026, ahead of Uber’s 39 million and Ola’s 28.1 million. 

Nuro testing in Japan, using Toyota Prius vehicles. This is Nuro’s 1st international market. 

Zoox is expanding to Dallas and Phoenix, its ninth and tenth testing locations. Zoox currently has robotaxi operations only in Las Vegas. 

VW is larger-scale producing the ID.Buzz - 500 units are expected to roll out of the Hanover plant this year. 

WeRide and Geely’s Farizon partner to produce more robotaxis, targeting an additional 2,000 GXR units by the end of 2026, bringing the global fleet to over 2,600 vehicles. 

Vay reaches 50,000 trips. Naviget is a new Indian taxi aggregator with a focus on airports. 

Waymo driving mistakes: (1) In Austin, a Waymo stops past train guard gates. A similar incident occurred a while ago; (2) In San Antonio, a man in the driver's seat of a Waymo (i.e. safety driver) has been cited after the autonomous vehicle ignored barricades and drove onto the scene of a house fire; and (3) in Arizona, A Waymo was trying to cross highway traffic and got “dumbfunded”, stopping in front of incoming traffic. 

#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business - a consultancy focused on Innovation, Growth and Autonomy in the Mobility industry.

Mobility Business | All Things Mobility

Innovation.
Growth.
Autonomy.

www.movingppl.com

Autonomous Shuttles, DRT & Bus-Based Mobility 🚍🚌

Aurrigo wins a £6.28M contract with Ultra Global to build 25 autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs) for a leading rapid transit system specialist. That comes out to £251,000 per vehicle. 

BusUp 2025 results:

• Revenue up 24% to €46M

• Over 160 corporate customers

• Operating in Spain, Portugal, Mexico, the United States and Brazil; also has a presence in Colombia and Italy 

• Over 190 transport operators and a team of 200+ people

• 2026 outlook: €66M revenue & positive EBITDA

Micromobility 🚲🛴

More on the Zeus - Superpedestrian acquisition: 

• Goal: achieve economies of scale

• Acquisition includes ”only” Superpedestrian and the LINK & Wisk brands; it does not include SURF Beyond

• Brand strategy to be reviewed in 2027; for now continuing with existing brands of Superpedestrian, LINK, and ZEUS

Delivery - bikes to cars, bots & drones 🍽🧺

InDrive acquires Krave Mart, Pakistani grocery delivery platform, after making an initial investment and working together since December 2024. The all-stock deal was concluded last year, and was now approved by the local Competition Commission. Foodpanda (by Delivery Hero) is the leading food delivery platform; while InDrive holds the #1 position in ride-hailing. 

Grubhub partners with Dexa, drone platform, to launch Wonder food delivery drones in New Jersey. 

And an analysis on Grubhub and its Wonder-backed comeback, by Maxx Freedman. Key takeaways: 

• Grow demand: Grubhub is growing market share in NYC, after being practically dead

• Multiple channels: Restaurant listing and promotions started to appear on Wonder 

• Dine-In & loyalty: the Claim (dine-in rewards app) acquisition opened up dine-in and loyalty

Would this bring Wonder to be the 3rd player in delivery? For more here. 

New delivery bot by Neubility. 

I love meeting new people and learning about innovation in mobility. Let’s get-to-know / catch up.

Coffee chat

25 minutes get-to-know / catch-up

app.reclaim.ai/m/Barak-Sas/25min

In other news 📰

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approves a pilot program that will allow companies to test their eVOTLS across 26 US states, even though they have not received full regulatory certification. This follows an executive order from Trump on the subject. Companies include Archer, Beta, Joby, Elroy Air and Wisk. 

Also Archer answers to Joby’s trade secret theft lawsuit by accusing Joby of defrauding the U.S. government and its competitors by falsely presenting itself as an American-made company - while having deep ties with China. 

Google Maps is introducing a Gemini-powered conversational “Ask Maps” feature along with an updated “Immersive Navigation” experience. 

Uber founder Travis Kalanick now founded Atoms. According to the website, the company focuses on the food, mining and transportation industries - using Physical AI - specialized robots, not humanoids. 

Atoms

Gridwise 2026 Annual Gig Mobility Report - selected findings: 

• Most gig workers can be found in food delivery (71%), followed by ride-hailing (36%) and grocery delivery (32%); 35% of gig workers are women ; only 8% of gig workers continue in the trade after 6 years 

• Biggest challenges include unpredictable earning (44%) and vehicle maintenance costs (31%)

• Customer prices rose 9.6% while driver gross pay per trip grew just 3.6%

• Multi-apping is lower than usually perceived - only 24.3% use more than one app

This report is extremely detailed and deserves a read - download for yourself here. 

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Andy Fisher is the new Strategy Lead @ National Highways. 

Chisom Anoke  is the new Regional Head English-speaking Africa @ Yango. 

James Barber-Chadwick is the new Interim Co-CEO @ Transport for All. 

Kevin Hart is the new Board Member @ Jersey Community Transport (JCT). 

Louis-Nicolas Amedee-Manesme is the new Directeur Général (Chief Executive Officer) @ ECOV.

TaeGyun Kim is the new Executive Director @ Studio Galilei. 

Thiagarajan Iyer is the new Lead Product Manager Data & AI @ HudHud Maps. 

Yochai Abadi is the new Chief Executive Officer @ Pcentra. 

Congrats and good luck!

Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

#movingpeople - All Things Mobility

Subscribe here.

movingpeople.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Attention: the way #movingpeople reaches your inbox is about to change. 
Today, the email sender is “Barak Sas”, that’s me. Soon, the sender is going to become #movingpeople. I am giving advance notice, change will occur toward the end of March. 

Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

#movingpeople - All Things Mobility

Subscribe here.

movingpeople.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕

Momenta, Chinese AV tech, filed confidentially for an IPO in Hong Kong, aiming to raise $1 billion. Back in 2024, the company explored a US IPO; that didn’t materialise. The previous funding round was in 2021, with the company raising $1.3 billion in several Series 3 trenches across 2021. 

A Waymo blocks an ambulance on the way to a mass shooting site in Austin. The vehicle, unable to complete a U-turn, took over 1:30 minutes to clear the road, and was able to clear the road only after being directed manually by a police officer and after disengaging from autonomous mode and driven remote. No harm was done this time. 

Preliminary findings on the Waymo school accident; “The Waymo vehicle was traveling north at 17 mph (27 km/h) when it braked and struck the student… (the) investigation will scrutinize the automated driving system’s intended behavior in school zones and surrounding area”. 

CyberCab - on one hand, Tesla accelerates production and gets ready for volume production in April. See drone filming of 25 CyberCab units in Tesla’s Texas facility. On the other hand, Victor Nechita, Tesla’s CyberCab Vehicle Programme Manager, is leaving Tesla after 9 years. 

Taking a step back: learning from Zoox’s journey (no wheel, no pedals) and from Tesla’s Austin performance, there is zero chance that Tesla will run anything more than a very limited and constrained pilot on US public roads. Which raises the question - what is Tesla planning? And where? Vehicles are manufactured for a reason, and the US public roads is not the answer.. 

Twitter tweet

Pony AI says it achieved robotaxi unit economics breakeven in Shenzhen (now) and Guangzhou (last year). On a per day basis, net revenue exceeded costs, with an average 23 daily orders. Note: this is in no way indicating better unit economics compared to a human driver (as some posted on LinkedIn). 

Elmo sets new remote driving record: 157 km/h from 3,300 km away. This was performed on the F1 circuit in Barcelona, with 5G connection. 

ComfortDelGro (CDG) is considering bringing autonomous vehicles to London. This follows pilots in China and Singapore. 

Uber explores subscription-based models for drivers. 

Lalamove aims to double its registered ride-hailing drivers to 20,000 by Summer of 2026. Taking into account all drivers, including delivery drivers, Lalamove has 35,000 drivers; so this is essentially a move aimed at convincing delivery drivers to commit to ride-hailing.  

Tamas Gabor turned my attention to this article about the taxi market in Budapest, Hungary: 

• Bolt (±3,000 cars) and Uber (±1,500) control 2/3 of the market; Főtaxi (±1,500) is another large player, but uses Uber’s tech; and closes the list is City Taxi (±700 cars). 

• Post Covid, low driver supply and high demand had Bolt incentivizing drivers to leave their transitional taxi companies. This caused a vicious cycle: drivers leave → fee revenue drops → companies raise fees → more drivers leave; until companies started to shut down.

• Uber re-entered the market 2024 and the pressure intensified - leading to many taxi companies (such as 6×6 Taxi, Taxi 4, and Taxim) to close down in 2025.

In the Czech Republic, a new law mandates that all taxi drivers pass a Czech language test. Taxi numbers went up during the last decade from circa 5,000 to 16,000 today, with many taxi drivers foreigners, many from Ukraine. Bolt has initiated a language program; rule is to take effect from January 2028, ample time to get ready. Dobře se učte!

#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business - a consultancy focused on Innovation, Growth and Autonomy in the Mobility industry.

Mobility Business | All Things Mobility

Innovation.
Growth.
Autonomy.

www.movingppl.com

Autonomous Shuttles, DRT & Bus-Based Mobility 🚍🚌

Self-driving shuttles in Punggol, Singapore, to open to the public from April 1st. Routes are operated by Grab and by ComfortDelGro; AV tech by WeRide. 

Newark airport to test self-driving shuttles, using Oceaneering (ZF vehicle), Ohmio and Glydways vehicles. Testing, limited to a few weeks and closed to the public, will help the airport decide on its future; RFP is expected next year, launch circa 2030. 

A thorough Roger French written review and a Geoff Marshall video of the autonomous bus trials in Cambridge, 

Studio Galilei launches L3 autonomous DRT in Suwon. 

Via numbers are improving, but the stock is going down. Via achieved 29% YoY revenue growth to $434.3M and improved its losses, but not by enough, and investors are pricing the company as a B2G transport player rather than a SaaS tech-company. My thoughts: vertical integration into operations and payments. Read my analysis here. 

Via numbers are improving, but the stock is going down.

To understand why, let’s look at Via’s 2025 financial report.

www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7435274866771087360/?originTrackingId=bu23woAmSDXBQRoXwDDMUQ%3D%3D

SWVL is back to the US. Padam to operate expanded Surrey Connect (UK) services, for a 3 year period. . 

Micromobility 🚲🛴

Zeus Mobility acquires Superpedestrian Europe. Superpedestrian spun out of MIT in 2012, and in 2020, during the micromobility boom, introduced to the public a scooter brand, LINK. In late 2023 the company shut down, and in March 2024 the European operations were sold to Norway-based Surf Beyond. In July 2025 Superpedestrain declared another bankruptcy. It is now March 2026, and Zeus is acquiring the company. Zeus was founded in 2020 in Ireland. In August 2022 it acquired UK-based Zwings and in April 2023 Irish-based Zipp Mobility. Following the acquisition, Zeus plans to deploy up to 20k vehicles across 30 European locations over the next 12 months. 

London e-scooter data from TfL, dating to September 2024 to 2025, shows 54% ride increase from 1.3 to 2 million rides with utilisation increasing 50% from 1 trips per day per vehicle to 1.5 TVD. London has 4,000 vehicles operated by Voi and Lime. A third tender to operate e-scooters in London is being released these days. 

Joey Schaap, CEO of Fleetser, a used micromobility commerce platform, shared with me that they recently sold second hand e-scooters to Kai Ride in Senegal. By selling ‘Western’ vehicles, micromobility operators in developing markets have the opportunity to acquire quality vehicles at lower prices, making it easier to launch operations. 

ILUS Bike is an Estonian bike-sharing hardware company; Rico Jaanipere, the company’s CEO, shared with me that they recently debuted 3 new bike-sharing vehicles, fit for private and public use.

ILUS bike - Reliable Bike-Sharing Systems

Reliable bike-sharing systems for every operation type. Electric bikes, station-based systems and simple regualar bikes. Discover our 3-model fleet.

ilusbike.com

Ryde into Germany - launching 2,500 scooters in Frankfurt (2.000) and Aachen (500). Beryl in Bradford, UK, with circa 200 e-bikes and at least 41 docking station hubs. 

Delivery - bikes to cars, bots & drones 🍽🧺

Flink, quick commerce, raises $100M at a $900M valuation, in a round led by Prosus. To date the company raised $1.4 billion (yes, there were downrounds, at least one). Flink, which says it is EBITDA profitable, will use the money to expand in Germany and the Netherlands, its two existing markets. If the name Prosus rings a bell, it is because they recently acquired Just Eat Takeaway (JET). 

JET closes Denmark operations, after 25 years (!), citing “challenging circumstances”. This continues a trend of consolidation - also this week Keeta postpones launching Brazil operations, laying off nearly 200 employees; last week DoorDash announced it is leaving four international markets across Asia and the Gulf states; and a week before that foodora (Delivery Hero) announced scaling back from Finland.  

Rapido formally launches its standalone food delivery app, Ownly, across Bengaluru. Pilot began back in August 2025. Ownly business model: zero commission for restaurant, customers pay delivery fee. This business model differentiates Ownly from major competitors Swiggy and Zomato, both with robust partner restaurant networks, making it easier to onboard supply (restaurants).  

IKEA China launches commercial robovan delivery, partnering with Neolix. This follows a pilot which saw customer waiting times cut by two-thirds and halved transport costs.

Uber Eats deploys delivery bots in Philadelphia, in partnership with Avride. Some stats: speed of 5 mph (8 km/h) on sidewalks; carry up to 55 pounds (25 kg); use lidar, cameras, and ultrasonic sensors to detect obstacles up to 200 feet away (60 meters); swappable batteries offering up to 31 miles (50 km) of range.

Instagram post

A debate on the safety of delivery bots. 

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/missy-cummings-7681588b_while-the-focus-on-remote-operators-in-self-driving-activity-7435704615897092096-y52c

In Morocco, Glovo shuts down all seven dark stores, following an administrative closure in one of those sites. Moroccan regulators are in the process of enforcing new measures, such as a cap on restaurant commission and hourly delivery rider minimum wage. 

Grubhub settles class action lawsuit over misleading customer fees, pays $5M. And in a different lawsuit, regarding alleged driver employment misclassification, is moving toward a $24.7M settlement. It seems that Wonder is looking to clean the table and move forward. 

HungryPanda (HP): a dispute with workers in Australia sees HungryPanda contacting the Chinese police to complain about delivery riders, with the company accusing those riders of intimidation and blackmail. There is currently a riders’ campaign for better wages and conditions. Also HungryPanda takes heat in NYC from delivery riders, who went out in the snow to deliver, only to find out restaurants were closed, and received no pay for their work.. 

AV Freight, Industrial & Logistics 🚛🚜

Oxa raises a $103M Series D, bringing the total raised to >$350M. Half of the round came from the UK’s National Wealth Fund and Oxa expects an additional close toward the end of H1/26. Funds will be used to expand in the industrial autonomy category. 

KargoBot, spun out of Didi Chuxing, raises $100M Series B to expand its fleet to 1,000 “robo-tricks” by the end of the year, up from 400 (!) autonomous trucks KargoBot says it operates today. This number, if true, puts China wayyyyyyyy in front of US and European competitors, who operate trucks in the dozens. 

Aurrigo granted regulatory approval to handle cargo operations at East Midlands Airport. The company will operate two of its Auto-Cargo vehicles and one Auto-Shuttle. 

Toyota Tsusho starts public road demonstration tests of autonomous driving semi-trailer trucks between logistics hubs in Japan. Robotruck delivers the autonomous technology. 

Japan-based Macnica and Australian-based Applied EV partner to commercialise autonomous logistics and industrial in Japan. 

I love meeting new people and learning about innovation in mobility. Let’s get-to-know / catch up.

Coffee chat

25 minutes get-to-know / catch-up

app.reclaim.ai/m/Barak-Sas/25min

In other news 📰

Zeno raises $25M to speed up production of its battery-swap motorbikes.

umob, last of the B2C MaaS players, wins a B2G contract - to exclusively operate micromobility bookings in Eindhoven for 11 (!) years. 

Weego raises $1.1M to expand its MaaS platform across Morocco and Africa.

Hyundai eVTOL subsidiary Supernal lays off most of its staff - 296 people - in major restructuring; eVTOLs are not the immediate future for Hyundai. 

IQberry partnered with Optibus. IQberry helps PTOs integrate multiple platforms and data sources to achieve higher efficiency. 

WHILL, autonomous wheelchair airport operations, expands to its 15th airport. 

Shane Bogni

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Belen Romero is the new Senior Director, General Manager (Latin America) @ Uber. 

Benjamin La Trobe is the new Senior Account Executive @ Volue.

Bhaskar P V is the new Associated Partner @ MHP – A Porsche Company. 

Cameron Gieda is the new Data Broker / Fully Annotated Real World Long Tail Scenarios Database @ Bot Auto. 

James Craven is the new Director Business Development - AAMI at Advanced Air Mobility Institute.

Patrick A. BILOMBA is the new Fleet Director @ AnyVan.

Pejvan Beigui co-founded and is the new CEO @ Konboi, an AI Cruise Control startup. Good luck!

Raaghav Dawar is the new Head of Enterprise - Bolt for Business @ Bolt

Ran Yurist is the new Senior Regional Lead, Government relations @ Lime.

Scherezade Bejarano is the new Senior Tender Manager @ Bolt. 

Tamlyn Shimizu is the new Head of Markets & Partnerships - Global; Senior Communications Expert @ BABLE Smart Cities. 

Congrats and good luck!

Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

#movingpeople - All Things Mobility

Subscribe here.

movingpeople.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕

Wayve raises $1.2 billion on a $8.6 billion valuation, with $300M additional funding from Uber contingent on a successful London robotaxi launch. Wayve focuses on (1) robotaxi services, which the company is getting ready to launch in London in partnership with Uber; and (2) ADAS system for the likes of Mercedes, Nissan and Stellantis, which all invested in the round. Other investors include NVIDIA and Microsoft, both are companies with ties to Wayve’s operations. To put the numbers in perspective, Waymo’s (post-money) valuation is $126 billion, Mobileye’s market cap is circa $7.4 billion. 

Waymo launches commercial robotaxi services in four new cities - Dallas, Houston and San Antonio in Texas and Orlando, Florida - bringing the total number of cities to 10. Also Waymo starts testing in Charlotte, North Carolina, and is involved in an accident on the first day; and begins testing on Austin highways. The company’s fleet size is estimated at 3,000 vehicles, which are offering close to 500,000 rides a week. 

Ready to Ride: Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando

Uber sets up Uber Autonomous Solutions - designed to commercialize autonomous solutions around the world. The new unit is organised across three areas: Infrastructure (AV data for training, regulatory support, fleet financing); User Experience (in-car experience, customer support, product development support); and Fleet Operations (fleet management, remote assistance, field operations, insurance) - with the goal to accelerate autonomous deployments at lower cost-per-mile.  

My takeaways. 

1) Commercialisation is years away. Don’t be blinded by Waymo’s 10 commercial deployments - they are indeed commercial, but are very heavily subsidized. Unless you’re raising $16 billion, you can’t scale without at least a reasonable adjusted operational profitability - and it is not clear how far the industry is from that. Uber’s solution hits the spot here. 

2) Uber’s stock has been hit by investors worried that Uber will not last the autonomous age, as the company does not have its own autonomous tech unit. The stock is down from circa $100 in October 2025 to circa $75 today. This new unit should (might) calm investors. 

And Uber acquires parking reservation app SpotHero. Launched in 2011, SpotHero is present in over 400 cities and 13,000 parking facilities in North America. Note the strategy: Uber intends to offer SpotHero to USERS (not just drivers) - which could use the Uber app to reserve parking for their OWN VEHICLE in airports, for events etc. In addition, Uber will use the reach with parking facilities to manage their electric rollout and driver-related parking needs. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

Uber is buying SpotHero and says its app will add support for parking reservations. | The Verge

May Mobility expanding autonomous footprint in Japan. The latest service launched last month in Saito City for a 30 day demo project connecting the city centre to a tourist attraction on the outskirts.  

May Mobility’s Expanding Autonomous Footprint in Japan | May Mobility

Kazakhstan is looking to update its gig-economy tax system, taxing directly from the turnover, not profits. It is suggested that platforms deduct a percentage of drivers’ turnover directly to the taxi authority. Bolt expanded its taxi services to 21 counties outside Dublin and Cork.

DRT, Bus-Based Mobility & AV shuttles 🚍🚌

Lukas Foljanty’s (excellent) 2025 On-Demand Transit Market Report is out - key takeaways: 

⬇️ 2025 slowing down: ~375 new projects launched globally, 15% fewer than in 2024. Net market growth slowed to 215 new active projects

🚌 Competitive landscape steady with 50+ active solution providers - Via #1 with a global market share of 24%; Spare at #2

🌎 North America, Japan and South Korea saw the most growth; paratransit is leading the US

🏛️ Government-funded pilots are fading away - and the true commercial size of the market will be revealed in a couple of years 

For the full report and the active projects map. I strongly recommend reading the full report. 

Lukas also covers Via’s IPO and the Downtowner acquisition in detail. My key takeaways: 

1) Via’s future is in operation. DRT-tech has become a commodity; the TAM and revenue opportunities are much larger in operations (see image); and it enables Via to offer an end-to-end solution. Via has been practicing operating fleets in the UK, so this should not come as a complete surprise. 

2) From reading Via’s FY25 report it seems the company paid $40M for Downtowner. This is a bit baffling, as Downtowner do not seem to possess any major tech or industry segment advantages over Via, and the price seems high (coming out at roughly $400k per operating service). Over the years I’ve seen Via execute a very clever M&A strategy, so not sure what happened here. Readers are welcomed to inform me. 

3) For the full Via FY25 report, which saw 29% increase in revenue to $434.3M and an operating loss of $76.6M. 

On-Demand Transit Market Report — 2025 Recap | by Lukas Foljanty | Feb, 2026 | Medium

SCALAR People Mobility, by ZF, is shutting down. ZF has been laying off / selling a number of divisions / units in order to both focus and reach profitability, and the People Mobility unit is another segment that will close. 

BasiGo, Kenyan electric bus startup, enters fixed-route commuting, as a SaaS product offered to local Saccos - transport cooperative societies that own and manage matatus (informal transport vehicles). 

Car Sharing/renting 🚗

Socar returns to operational profitability

• Revenue up 9% to circa $324M

• Gross profit $70.2M, or 21.6%

• Operating profit is roughly $16M, or ±4.92%. 

GreenMobility pilots smoke detection tech by INVERS. GetGosigns a data-sharing MOU with the Singaporean Land Transport Authority (LTA).Greencar to expand its fleet in Incheon (South Korea) to 600 vehicles.

Micromobility 🚲🛴

Dott reports €173M revenue in 2025 and €7M in Adjusted EBITDA and an EBITDA loss of €4M. The €11M (between +7 and -4) is attributed to one-off restructuring costs. To put things in perspective, last week Voi reported €178.2M revenue, €18.6 EBITDA and a loss of €7.6M in Operating Profit. 

Also Voi grew its subscription revenue mix from 31% to 39% in 2025; is launching Voi Business; and wins to operate in Biel, Switzerland. 

Groningen, the Netherlands: Voi and Dott will each roll out 400 electric shared bicycles in the city, replacing Bolt; Check to continue e-scooter operations expanding to 600 vehicles; and Moby to roll out 50 e-cargo bikes. 

Nextbike wins a contract for a city bike in Toruń, Poland. 

Lime introduces new benefits as part of its LimePrime subscription plan - these include flat-rate rides, more discounted fares and more. The new plan will be rolled out across the US, the UK, Italy, Germany, Australia and New Zealand.

Forest pilots in-app reaction-time based sobriety check, implemented on riders based on location and time-of-day. The check itself is 

HD Rain is an insurance broker underwriting weather risk - Enzo Lanoue shared with me that due to the increase in rainy days in France in 2026, operators in the five main cities listed here have lost estimated revenues of €1.2M to €2.7M.

Delivery - from bikes & cars to bots & drones 🍽🧺

DoorDash winds down operations in Qatar & Singapore (Deliveroo) and in Japan & Uzbekistan (Wolt). A couple of weeks ago DoorDash published its 2025 financial report, showing good results which sent the stock up circa 10%. 

Swiggy shuts down Snacc, its 15-minute food delivery, due to profitability concerns.  The service has been running for just under a year. There is fierce competition in the Indian rapid-delivery space, and the market as a whole is experiencing losses. 

Speedbird raises $5.8M bridge round to scale drone deliveries in Brazil; iFood is a strategic investor. 

Uber partners with Manna Drones for drone delivery in Ireland, with the goal of launching a joint commercial service. 

After hitting Foodinho (Glovo’s Italian brand) with a one year supervision of a judicial administrator for exploiting riders, Italian regulators are knocking on Deliveroo’s doors - for the same reason. The company has been put under supervision and the investigation into rider exploitation is going on. 

Coco introduces its next gen delivery bot - the Coco 2. Fully autonomous, drives on roads and bike lanes (at speed of up to 13 mph, or 21 km/h), sidewalks, and indoors - and reliable in extreme weather.  

Coco’s new delivery robot is hitting the streets and without a human driver | Semafor

AV Freight & Logistics 🚛🚜

Einride raises $113M via PIPE ahead of its public (SPAC) debut, set for H2/26. Einride is valued at $1.35 billion pre-money - which is down from the $1.8 billion initially reported when first announced. While Einride does operate a few autonomous trucks (to which extent of autonomy I am not sure), most of the company’s 200 trucks are electric driver operated. 

Harbinger, Electric truck OEM, acquires ADAS company Phantom AI. Harbinger, which has been using Phantom ADAS in its electric trucks, has already signed (an unknown) commercial agreement with ZF, which will offer Phantom’s tech to the OEM it works with. 

Bot Auto to begin driverless freight operations with Ryan Transportation. The use case: overnight run between Houston and Dallas, a roughly 200 miles (320 km) 3 hour drive.  Torc Robotics expands autonomous truck testing to Michigan Public Roads. 

In other news 📰

Uber and Joby partner to allow booking of an eVTOL from the Uber app. But let’s not get too excited, because: (a) this partnership was available, albeit for a limited time, when operating under Blade, before Joby aviation acquired Blade’s people operations; and (b) First commercial (bookable) service expected in Dubai in H2/26. I’m writing this as Iran is sending missiles to Dubai, so we might see that pushed back to 2027. 

Archer sues Vertical Aerospace over alleged patent infringement. 

Archer Sues Vertical Over Alleged Patent Infringement | Aviation Week Network

Spiro, e-bikes manufacturer and battery-swap network operator, raises $50M to facilitate growth. To date, Spiro deployed 80,000+ electric motorcycles, operates 2,500+ battery-swapping stations, and has completed over 30 million battery swaps.

Spiro raises $50m to scale EV battery swapping across Africa

Tesla sues California DMV to reverse the ruling that found Tesla engaged in false advertising with its “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving” marketing. This comes a few days after Tesla changed the names, to comply with the ruling. In a different story and a different part of the world, Tesla is fighting in court aFrench beverage company which is allegedly “trademark squatting” on the CyberCab trade name, after Tesla neglected to protect the name prior to the public launch. 

Google Maps can fully operate in South Korea, now that data restrictions, initially placed for national security reasons, have been compromised. To operate, Google will need to keep data in the country, maintain coordinate and image limitations on military and national security sites. Remember - South Korea is at war with the North. 

TIER IV joins a Japan Ministry of Defense project to advance unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) deployment for security operations. 

An updated NYC For-Hire Vehicle dashboard: 

NYC HVFHV Trip Dashboard - September 2025NYC nycfhv.urbanflows.netHVFHV Trip Dashboard - September 2025

nycfhv.urbanflows.net

Beware of fake recruiters. They are everywhere lately. Remember - you never have to pay out of pocket for training or as part of the recruitment process. Use AI to double check email addresses, names, messages. 

May Mobility Warns of Sophisticated Recruiting Scam

What makes this especially infuriating: These scammers are deliberately targeting people who are doing everything right—putting themselves out there, investing their time, their energy, and their hope in building a better future.

www.linkedin.com/posts/tomchutang_ai-hiring-jobsearch-share-7432911587411263488-4PPD/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android&rcm=ACoAAABw51UBszOyu3CQmNxZMbo6VV78HUAZZLc

I love meeting new people and learning about mobility & delivery innovation. Let’s get-to-know.

Let's meet

25 minutes get-to-know / catch-up

app.reclaim.ai/m/Barak-Sas/25min

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Adam Halsey is the new VP, Business Development @ Electreon. 

Amit Regev is the new CEO at Flytrex. 

Dmitry Chu is the new Head of Rider Experience - Ops @ Voi Technology. 

Ferdinand Burgersdijk is the new Trainer - data governance, digitalisation and ITS @ UITP. 

Ha Oun Son is the new Country Manager South Korea @ Archer. 

Jackson Lester is the new Product Manager @ Waymo. Congrats and well deserved Jackson!

JC Porter is the new Director of Parking and Transportation Services @ Arizona State University.

Luca Volpi is the new Senior Regional Legal Counsel - Markets & Revenue @ Lime. 

Marion Humeau is the new Directrice Experience Client Care Service France @ Renault Group.

Mike Evans-Ford is the new Local Authority Lead @ JustPark. 

Patrick Kenney is the new Digital Adoption Representative @ Caterpillar. 

Sara Crifasi is the new Senior Counsel, Autonomous Mobility and Delivery @ Uber. 

Sara Sloman is the new Global Partnerships Director @ Paythru. 

Tom Anstee is the new Sales and Partnership Co-ordinator @ Automation News. 

Congrats and good luck!

Thank you for reading. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

#movingpeople

#movingpeople is a weekly mobility & delivery newsletter - from Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi through Remote-Driving & Delivery Drones to e-bikes and Autonomous Freight & Logistics.

movingpeople.beehiiv.com/subscribe

#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business  - a consultancy focused on Innovation, Growth and Autonomy in the Mobility industry.

Mobility Business | All Things Mobility

Innovation.
Growth.
Autonomy.

www.movingppl.com

Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕

Tesla reports five more robotaxi accidents, bringing the total to 14 since launch in June 2025, or every 57,000 miles. Unlike other autonomous companies, Tesla hides the details under business confidentiality, so it is not clear what exactly happened in each and every one of these accidents. You can see the list of all the 14 accidents in this link and (unrelated) a recent ‘almost’ accident where a car in FSD nearly drove into a lake.  

Twitter tweet

Tesla is having a hard time getting its AV program off the ground. So far only 42 vehicles have been deployed, with 19% availability. Also Tesla rolls off the production line the first Cybercab - a vehicle with no steering wheel and no pedals. And, based on Tesla’s achievements in autonomy so far, no use outside limited testing. 

All of a sudden, the world (or, at least, the US Congress) realised Waymo uses remote assistance personnel, which are based in the US and the Philippines. Key takeaways: 

• At any point in time, there are roughly 70 remote assistance agents overseeing the fleet

• Only US-based teams can move a stopped vehicle; this has not happened outside of testing

• The Philippines based teams provide advice and support “but do not directly control, steer, or drive the vehicle”

• Pull, not push - assistance agents respond to calls coming in from the autonomous vehicles, and do not monitor or push instructions to the fleet 

• Move on, nothing to see here. 

Waymo presents the Ojai by Zeekr - using the company's 6th generation driver (on which I wrote last week)

Twitter tweet

Motional showing automated closed doors. 

Twitter tweet

New York Governor Kathy Hochul pulled a proposal that would have allowed commercial robotaxi services in the state (outside of NYC), as the proposal had limited support with the state’s legislative bodies. And while Waymo is testing in NYC, it is highly unlikely that it would receive a commercial license in the city, given Mamdani’s stands. 

Uber to invest $100M in robotaxi fast-charging infrastructure, beginning with SF, LA and Dallas. Uber is effectively underwriting the commercial risk of building new stations (by 3rd party operators) in exchange for discounted rates for its drivers

In Barcelona, Cabify to integrate traditional taxis into its platform, as regulation tightens on VTC operations in the region. Cabify is offering taxis a 7% commission fee, the lowest (so far) in the market. 

Singapore-based TADA is looking to raise $100M in investment to support its growth in existing and new markets - the US, Asia and Africa. 

Augustin Friedel plotted L4 players based on financial power and fleet size and this is the result: 

DRT, Bus-Based Mobility & AV shuttles 🚍🚌

eVersum are looking for a strategic investor (!) - willing to sell 25.1% equity stake in the company. 

#strategicinvestment eVersum

🔋 Strategic Investment Opportunity – Join the Future of Zero-Emission, Autonomy-Ready, Public Transport

The transformation of public transport is accelerating — and we are entering the next stage. eVersum is opening the door to a strategic partner through the acquisition of a 25.1% equity stake.

www.linkedin.com/posts/eversum_strategicinvestment-electricmobility-autonomousdriving-activity-7429284112898732032--xD1

Holon partners with CharterUp, a bus charter and shuttle platform, to deploy autonomous shuttles. CharterUp has shuttle operations in many campuses (university, airport, business parks etc.) and will now be able to offer Holon’s autonomous solution. 

Glydways to begin a pilot in Atlanta, marking the global first time Glydways’ system is used for public transport. The pilot, planned to launch December 2026, connects the ATL SkyTrain at the Georgia International Convention Center to the Gateway Center Arena, along a dedicated 0.5-mile. 

Rebel business case on autonomous public transport. This analysis also looks at revenue loss and partial driver base operations. And there is also an online calculator. 

Car Sharing/renting 🚗

Zoomcar, P2P car-share, published results for the quarter ended December 31, 2025 (Q3 25/26). Key takeaways: improving results, still in extremely red territory. 

• GBV +1% YoY to $6.6M

• 3% decline in operating revenue to $2.37M (36% of gross revenue)

• Adjusted EBITDA loss improved by 74% to -$0.83M

• Net loss improved 91% YoY to -$0.72M (vs. -$7.92M prior year)

• Questions over Zoomcar’s ability to continue as a going concern, with its management saying that its existing cash can fund operations only until March 31, 2026

Zoomcar is currently raising additional capital, including a private placement bridge financing with a minimum raise of $2M and up to $10M. 

Brussels shares car-sharing and micromobility 2024 data. First carsharing:

• 4,751 daily free-floating shared car trips; fleet was in use for 13% of the time, compared to 2.4% for a privately owned car.

• And 976 daily station-based  

Also  Cambio (station-based) and Poppy (free-floating) conducted a survey which found that car sharing helps 6 out of 100 people to let go of their car. 

Micromobility 🚲🛴

Voi published their FY25 financial report - key takeaways of a year that focused on making funds available and increasing fleet, with a major win in Paris and investment in e-bikes.

1. More vehicles and higher utilisation created more rides:
   Vehicle numbers +33% to 124k
   * TVD +16% to 2.56 trips per vehicle per day
   = Rides up 55% YoY to 115 million

2. But
   Net revenue per vehicle & day mostly the same - 3.94 in 2025 vs. 3.91 in 2024
   * Vehicle profit 57.5% in 2025 vs. 57.0% in 2024
   = Riders paid less for every ride  

To the P&L numbers:

• Net revenue +34% to €178.2M

• EBIT -€7.6M in 2025 vs. last year's -€3.3 - but that's actually better % wise this year

• Operating profit is -€7.6M vs. -€3.3M in 2024

Just a bit to go to profitability.

Trippy wins a 10 years (!) contract to deploy e-bikes in the city of Istanbul. The company will initially deploy a fleet of 600 vehicles, with growth based on demand and performance. This will be the company's sixth Turkish city.  

Ryde wins (again) in Bergen, Norway. 

A list of the five big investors in Donkey Republic - #1 is Nordic Compound invest, wealth management, with 20.6%, followed by Denmark’s Export and Investment Fund with 18.6%. 

In London, Bolt’s bikes are being “continually being moved out of their designated parking bays” (by competitors), causing thousands of pounds in fees. 

And shared micromobility 2024 data from Brussels:  

• 25,799 average daily free-floating scooter rides with a 1.93 turnover rate 

• 2,517 average daily stations-based bike rides with a 0.66 turnover date 

• 5,422 average daily free-floating bike rides with a 1.45 turnover date 

Delivery - from bikes & cars to bots & drones 🍽🧺

Uber Eats announces expansion to 7 new European markets: Austria, Denmark, Finland, Norway, the Czech Republic, Greece, and Romania. All of these are countries in which Wolt (subsidiary of DoorDash) operates and in the Nordic regions, dominates.

Meanwhile, foodora, a Delivery Hero subsidiary since 2015, ends Finnish operations after 10 years in the country. 

Breadfast, Egyptian-based quick-commerce and e-grocery platform, raises $50M pre-Series C round at a circa $400M valuation. Starting from fresh bread delivery nine years ago, Breadfast today operates across groceries, meals, pharmaceuticals, a prepaid card and its own coffee shops, serving 1 million orders per month. 

Neolix passes 100 million km in autonomous robovan operations. Neolix has over 16,000 vehicles deployed across 15 countries and holds operating permits in over 300 cities and regions in China,

Talabat updated 2026 guidance, swaps margin expansion for market share. Investment focus will be on scaling dark stores and strengthening loyalty program. As a consequence, Delivery Hero stocks fall. Also Talabat and an Abu-Dhabi government body are partnering to create a dedicated network for battery charging and swapping for last mile use case. 

Meituan forecasts a 2025 loss of circa S$3.5 billion, citing ongoing industry competition. China has been in a fierce delivery war the past few years. 

Avride introduces ads. Manna to begin a pilot programme in Cork. Amazon delivery drone crashes in Texas. 

Instagram post

AV Freight & Logistics 🚛🚜

The Ohio Department of Transportation is testing autonomous crash trucks to improve safety for road crews.

Why ODOT is testing autonomous crash trucks

In other news 📰

Are you based in Norway or are in the fuel stations industry? Help me solve the mystery of the non-disappearing fuel stations: while 30% of all cars in Norway are electric (and new cars are at >95% EVs) - the number of fuel stations only increases. See here for more details, no, it’s not because they all shifted to electric. 

What is going on with fuel stations in Norway?

30% of all passenger cars are now fully electric BUT - the number of “energy stations” is going... up!
From 1,819 (in 2012) → 1,838 (2020) → 1,947 (2024)
 
www.linkedin.com/posts/baraksas_what-is-going-on-with-fuel-stations-in-norway-activity-7429504427939586048--H-j/

Trapeze rebrands European operations into four transit technology companies, launching: 

• ebblo - operations control, passenger information, on-board systems and business intelligence

• Grampian Solutions - work allocation, compliance management and payroll accuracy for bus operators

• Naviquate - journey planning, ticketing, operations and publicity management, and real-time passenger information

• Nexfeld - fixed route planning and scheduling solutions for bus and rail operators

Lucid lays off 12% of its workforce in an effort to turn profitable. 

Getir founders are looking for $700m in damages from Mubadala, claiming the company failed to transfer key assets promised under a restructuring agreement. To be continued. 

London’s Pedicabs are being regulated - fares will be TfL determined; noise will be reduced; vehicles will undergo safety checks; and drivers would have to have a full driver license, pass criminal checks and meet English language requirements. It is likely to severely limit the “industry”.

Instagram post

I love meeting new people and learning about mobility & delivery innovation. Let’s get-to-know.

Let's meet

25 minutes get-to-know / catch-up

app.reclaim.ai/m/Barak-Sas/25min

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Eduard Anghel is the new Chief Executive Officer @ UNY. 

Joshua Williams is the new Director, Market Development @ Highland Electric Fleets.

Luke Bates is the new Lead Consultant Mobility @ FACTUAL.

Mike Evans-Ford is the new Local Authority Lead @ JustPark.

Congrats and good luck!

Thank you for reading. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

#movingpeople

#movingpeople is a weekly mobility & delivery newsletter - from Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi through Remote-Driving & Delivery Drones to e-bikes and Autonomous Freight & Logistics.

movingpeople.beehiiv.com/subscribe

#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business  - a consultancy focused on Innovation, Growth and Autonomy in the Mobility industry.

Mobility Business | All Things Mobility

Innovation, Growth and Autonomy in the Mobility industry.

www.movingppl.com

Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕

Lyft releases FY25 results- key takeaways: Lyft had a productive year in 2025 - going into Europe via the Freenow acquisition and into the chauffeur segment via the TBR Global Chauffeuring acquisition; scaling AV partnerships with Baidu, Waymo, Tensor Auto and BENTELER Group (& more); scaling the Media business; while keeping customer obsession at heart.

• Gross bookings up 15% YoY to $18.5 billion (vs. Uber $193 billion and Bolt $14 billion)

• Rides up 14% to 945.5 million (Uber 13.5 billion)

• Revenue up 9% to $6.3 billion (Uber $52 billion and Bolt $3 billion run-rate)

More in the 8-K and 10-K.

But Q4/25 reported revenue of $1.6 billion missed analysts’ expectations of $1.75 billion and the operating loss of $188.3M was lower than the expected $33M profit - sending the stock down from circa $17 on Tuesday before reports were released to $13.27 when trade closed Friday. 

Also Lyft introduces ‘teens’ feature - it allows riders as young as 13 to book a ride, as long as a parent / guardian created the account. On the driver side, Lyft has additional criteria for drivers, such as annual background checks. Uber and Waymo have a similar solution.  

Industry Partnerships: AV Tech + OEMs

Pony AI and GAC-Toyota partner to mass produce Gen-7 bZ4X Robotaxi. The bZ4X robotaxi model features a total of 34 sensors, including 9 LiDAR units, 14 cameras, and 4 millimetre-wave radars.

• By the end of 2026, the companies plan to produce 1,000 new robotaxis. 

• To put things in perspective, at the end of 2025, Pony had 1,159 vehicles

• And Pony’s goal is to have 3,000 by the end of the year.

GAC-Toyota is a 50%-50% partnership between the two companies, with Toyota vehicles manufactured in China. And the relationship between Toyota and Pony AI goes back to 2020, when Toyota invested $400M in Pony. 

Waymo releases 6th-generation Driver. The new system is (obviously better) more cost effective - there are 13 cameras (down from 29), four lidars (down from five), and six radars - a unit is expected to cost less than $20,000. Units are compatible with the Zeekr Ojai minivan the Hyundai IONIQ 5 - but are built to be OEM agnostic. 

Continuing with Hyundai - the company to supposedly supply Waymo with 50,000 units by 2028 (details are not very clear). At $50k per vehicle, it comes out to be a $2.5 billion deal. Again to put things in perspective - Waymo has a fleet of 2,500 vehicles today. If both companies are able to produce that many robotaxis by 2028 - this is indeed a game changer. 

And remember - it was before that Uber reserved 20,000 Lucid-Nuro vehicles and 25,000 unknown OEM-Wabbi vehicles. 

Grab releases FY25 financial report - key takeaways: 

• On-Demand GMV up 21% to $22.1 billion; Grab grew ‘Monthly Transacting User’ (MTU) spend by 4% and number of MTUs by 14% 

• Revenue up 20% to $3.37 billion 

• Operating profit $65M and Net profit $200M

Looking at the mobility-delivery breakdown: 

• Deliveries: GMV $14.2 billion (+21% YoY) - Revenue $1.8 billion (+21%) - Segmented Adjusted EBITDA $287M (+47%)

• Mobility:  GMV $7.9 billion (+19%) - Revenue $1.2 billion (+16%) - Segmented Adjusted EBITDA $690M (+21%). Note the much higher margins on mobility. 

Also Grab to acquire US fintech Stash Financial, an AI-powered investing app serving more than 1 million users and holding over $5 billion in assets, for $425M. The move will strengthen Grab’s financial services business, which in 2025 had a loan portfolio of $1.18 billion and revenue of $347M. 

Waymo goes driverless in Nashville. The Nashville fleet operation is managed by Lyft (through Flexdrive) and booking will be available via both Waymo and Lyft. CaoCao, Geely’s ride-hailing unit, reaches a robotaxi fleet of 100 vehicles. WeRide and Uber to deploy an additional 1,200 robotaxis in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Riyadh as soon as 2027. In perspective: today WeRide has 200 robotaxis in the region. Baidu and Uber partner to bring Apollo Go autonomous ride-hailing to Dubai.

11 ways Waymo can improve the rider experience - from the Driverless Digest. 

Uber’s early subsidies bought not network effect - but market power. Critics correctly identified that early Uber ran on subsidized growth disconnected from operational fundamentals, and correctly predicted that reaching profitability would require raising prices and squeezing drivers. They incorrectly predicted that Uber would prove unable to do this.Andrew Miller long read on the 2021 consensus that Uber was finished

DRT, Bus-Based Mobility & AV shuttles 🚍🚌

The Routing Company enters Fairfield County Transit, Ohio to offer “deviated fixed routes and demand response programmes”

Zoox starts testing in Columbus, Ohio with its testing fleet - which is used for mapping. 

Zoox autonomous vehicles are now on Columbus streets. What to know

Delivery - from bikes & cars to bots & drones 🍽🧺

Uber acquires Getir

In Turkey, Uber acquires Getir, 9 months after acquiring 85% of Trendyol Go, food and grocery delivery, for $700M. The deal sees Uber pay $335M for Getir’s food delivery business + $100M for a 15% stake in Getir’s grocery, retail, and water delivery business, with an option to complete the acquisition in the next few years. 

Getir was once the poster child for quick delivery operations - raising a total of $2.4 billion and reaching a $11.8 billion valuation. That ended after the pandemic, and eventually the company scaled back US and European operations to concentrate on its home market - Turkey. 2024 and 2025 saw an ownership struggle between Mubadala, the Emirati sovereign wealth fund and Getir’s one of two founders. Mubadala won, and has now sold the business. 

Bottom line: within a year, Uber has cemented its presence in the Turkey food, grocery and retail delivery business, 

Glovo & Delivery Hero 

In Chile, The Court for the Defense of Free Competition (TDLC) approved an agreement that finds Delivery Hero - parent company of both PedidosYa and Glovo - responsible for ‘fixing international markets’ between the two companies in Chile and in Egypt, Peru and Ecuador. The companies were fined $31.5M (in tax benefits) and to conduct executive antitrust training for the next five years. Note that this is the largest payment of free competition tax benefit from a single economic agent in Chile ever. 

And in Italy, Foodinho, a subsidiary of Glovo, is placed under judicial supervision over alleged labour exploitation and the CEO is being investigated. The allegations are that riders were paid below the poverty line. Whilst under judicial supervision, a court-appointed administrator will ensure Foodinho gives its workers the correct legal status and will monitor compliance with labour rules and conditions.

For context, back in June 2025 the European Commission fined Delivery Hero and its subsidiary Glovo a total of €329M for participating in a four-year cartel, from 2018 to 2022, while Delivery Hero only still held a minority stake in Glovo. 

In Nigeria, Chowdeck is being sued for misrepresenting the true cost of meals purchased through the platform. The claim is that Chowdeck inflates the base price of food items without clearly or transparently disclosing this markup.

In the UK, Just Eat launches both a robo-dog delivery trial in Milton Keynes with RIVR and a ‘regular’ delivery bot trial in Bristol with DELIVERS.AI. Robo-dogs can climb staircases, reach speeds of 14km an hour, open (unlocked) gates and carry up to 30kg of cargo. 

Cainiao, Alibaba’s logistics unit, and Zelos, maker of freight & delivery robovans, enter in a strategic partnership, which sees Cainiao invest in Zelos and an order of 20,000 unique robovans.  

Amazon Air drone delivery launches in Kansas City, the company’s 7th city. Service is available in a 7.5 mile (12km) radius from the fulfillment centre, and costs $4.99 per delivery or $9.99 for non-Prime members. Also Amazon Pharmacy to expand same-day delivery to an additional 2,000 US cities by the end of the year, bringing the total to 4,500 cities. To put numbers in perspective. 

@kctv_5

More Amazon drones will in the sky in Kansas City, Kansas. Here’s what to know. #drones #amazon #kckpd @Jiani N

Uber Eats introduces ‘Cart Assistant’, an AI feature designed to help customers with grocery shopping. Using a chatbot, users can enter a list or upload a picture of one, and the feature will automatically add everything to the basket. To choose the right product (e.g. which kind of milk) the feature uses past history. 

PNY, eCargo motorbike manufacturer, partners with UNY, swappable batteries - by bringing the Ponie P2 into UNY’s ecosystem. The Ponie P2 (by PNY) is now available in fixed and swappable versions. Read more about PNY here. 

AV Freight & Logistics 🚛🚜

Aurora’s trucks can now travel 1,000 miles nonstop - more than a human driver. This is important because it adds efficiency into Aurora’s autonomous operations - and efficiency is of major importance in freight. The 1,000 mile route is achieved in 15 hours vs. a 30 hour for a human driver, which has to comply with driving safety regulations.

• 2025 was the 1st Aurora generated commercial revenue, with $3M in revenue

• Net income loss of for the year was $816M

• 30 trucks on the fleet, of those 10 are operating fully autonomous (with a human observer). Fleet expected to grow to 200 by the end of the year

• As of January 2026, the company achieved 250,000 driverless miles and over 4.5 million commercial miles

For more, read the Q4/25 Shareholder letter. 

A 6:44 min video of a Gatik autonomous freight run. 

Momenta expands to autonomous trucks - plans to build an in-house dedicated team. 

Kodiak awarded autonomous ground vehicle development contract by the U.S. Marine Corps. Kodiak system will be added to the ROGUE-Fires, an anti-ship missile launcher. 

In other news 📰

Admiral Group is acquiring Flock, connected fleet insurance, for £80M (±$109M). 

Ever, used EV car market, raises $31M. 

LYT partners with the city of Salem to deploy transit signal priority tech. 

OX Delivers, a UK-based electric mobility company operating electric trucks in Rwanda, is set to be liquidated this week.

Chris Pangilinan created a geographic dashboard using the NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission's publicly available trip data.

NYC HVFHV Trip Dashboard - September 2025

nyc-hvfhv-dashboard.vercel.app

Ghost fleet: How New York City lost control of the tow truck industry by the Gothamist. 

I love meeting new people and learning about mobility & delivery innovation. Let’s get-to-know.

Let's meet

25 minutes get-to-know / catch-up

app.reclaim.ai/m/Barak-Sas/25min

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Astrid Hagqvist is the new Product Manager Onroad Autonomous Solutions  @ TRATON GROUP. 

Dalene Campbell is the new Consultant @ Transport & Economic Support Services.

David Lane is the new Head of Strategy and Planning for Europe Mobility @ WEX. 

Eifion Jenkins is the new Principal Client Director - National Governments @ Mott MacDonald.

Julie Authelet is the new Marketing Expert @ Losch Digital Lab. 

Saurabh Kabra is the new Vice President - Non Trade Advertising, Partnerships and Catalog @ Zepto. 

Wesley Bishop is the new Chief Customer Officer @ Addison Lee. 

Yann Simon is the new Head of City Partnerships @ EIT Urban Mobility. 

Congrats and good luck!

Thank you for reading. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

#movingpeople

#movingpeople is a weekly mobility & delivery newsletter - from Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi through Remote-Driving & Delivery Drones to e-bikes and Autonomous Freight & Logistics.

movingpeople.beehiiv.com/subscribe

#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business  - a consultancy focused on Innovation, Growth and Autonomy in the Mobility industry.

Mobility Business | All Things Mobility

Strategy & Corporate Development.
Market Research & Analysis.
Innovation Project Management.
Business Development & Partnerships.

www.movingppl.com

Top Story: Uber FY2025 numbers + AV Roadmap  

Uber published Q4 and FY2025 results - key takeaways: 

1. Weaker than (analyst) expectations brought shares down.

2. Active users reached 202 million; the milestone of 100 million was achieved in 2019. In the full year 2025, Trips grew 20% to 13.5 billion. 

3. More numbers:

For full year 2025, gross booking, revenue and adjusted EBITDA grew. These numbers are in million; revenue is $52 billion, Adjusted EBITDA is $8.7 billion. That is a lot of money.

When diving in to Q4/25 results:

• Mobility contributes 50% of total gross booking - 57% of revenue - with 30% take home

• Delivery is tougher - contributes 47% of total gross booking - 34% of revenue - with 19% take home

3. Autonomous scale: on the investor class Khosrowshahi said: “By the end of 2026... facilitating AV trips in up to 15 cities globally, split between the U.S. and other countries… by 2029, we intend to be the largest facilitator of AV trips in the world”. And also “autonomous vehicles are likely to remain a very small portion of the rideshare category for many years to come”.
   In Europe, expect new Uber AVs to launch in Munich, Hong Kong, Madrid and Zurich (and of course London). 

For the investor presentation.

Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕

Uber relaunches in Macau, China. Uber sold its Chinese operations to DiDi back in 2016, and exited Macau in 2017. This news is especially interesting for three reasons:

• We’re in 2026, simple math, 10 years after the sale to DiDi. Is there a non-compete clause that is now ending? Will we see Uber going into mainland China? 

• Robotaxi opportunity. DiDi builds its own tech stack, which means that Baidu, Pony AI and others are competitors. WIll Uber use that to enter the market?

• Uber held DiDi shares (it received roughly 12% equity when it sold to DiDi); and sold its stake in 2021 (for reasons that had to do with DiDi’s IPO and subsequent Chinese regulatory breakdown). This means there is nothing to stop Uber. 

As with anything in China - it is plausible - but not certain. Never underestimate the power of US-China politics on business decision making. To be continued. 

Uber pulls out of Tanzania after years of struggle with local regulation. Government guided prices (fixed, non-dynamic) and an up to 15% commission meant the market had limited potential. In Q3/25 Uber exited the Ivory Coast, also facing regulatory hurdles. In Kenya, some users are having a hard time without Visa. Take a look at a map of African countries Uber & Careem are active in. 

Grab partners with China based Hesai Technology to exclusively distribute LiDAR products in Southeast Asia. Grab is all-in on autonomous technology - the company invested in WeRide, May Mobility and Vay and partnered with Autonomous A2Z, Motional and Zelos. Now the company is diversifying into hardware. 

GoCab, fintech offering drivers in emerging markets a “drive-to-own” model, raises $45M. Of that, $15M is in equity and $30M is in debt. Money will be used to expand EV fleet and presence in Africa. 

Ruter’s self-driving pilot turns 1 year old.

• Operates five NIO ES8 autonomous SUVs. 

• Over 6,000 passengers

• Over 4.600 completed trips (8 months ago Ruter celebrated the 100th ride)

• 124 pick-up and drop-off points

• Existing vehicles are going out of service; six new ID.BUZZ will arrive for the 2nd phase of the pilot in H2.  

In Arizona, Uber was help liable in a driver sexual assault case and ordered to pay $8.5M in compensation. The jury found that Uber was liable because the driver was acting as an “apparent agent” of the company during the incident, but it did not find Uber liable for negligence or design defects. The compensation paid is less than the $144M damages requested. Uber plans to appeal the decision. There are around 3,000 more lawsuits waiting to go to court across the US. In a similar case in California Uber was found NOT liable, so the future is unclear. 

Waymo introduces Waymo World Model - a generative model for large-scale, hyper-realistic autonomous driving simulation - built on Google’s DeepMind Genie 3. The new model will allow Waymo to test extreme weather, rare safety events and, well, everything. 

The Waymo World Model: A New Frontier For Autonomous Driving Simulation

Tesla moved ‘safety monitors’ from the vehicle - and put them in a trailing car.

Tesla didn't remove the Robotaxi 'safety monitor' – it just moved them to a trailing car | Electrek

Vert wins Gold Environment Award at the Pro Driver Media QSi Awards - 2nd year running. Ukrainian Railways partners with Uklon and Bolt to offer taxi discounts for delayed trains. An account of robotaxi rides in China. 

A Wayve car runs a red light. Video. The irony: the car drove Alex Kendall, Wayve’s CEO, on its way to receive an OBE. To be fair - many drivers would have done the same. Bosch autonomous test vehicle, mapping city roads for Audi’s autonomous driving stack,  spotted in Helsinki. Abu Dhabi expands operations of the WeRide-Uber robotaxis to Khalifa City, Masdar City and Rabdan, with a plan to add 1,200 vehicles. Waymo arrives in Nashville. Baidu’s RT6 taxis operations officially launched in Dubai. 

Instagram post

DRT, Bus-Based Mobility & AV shuttles 🚍🚌

Ohmio launches in Solihull, UK. The autonomous service operates on a 7-km public route. Liftango provides the passenger and routing elements. 

New 26-seat autonomous ADL bus with Fusion Processing tech has entered passenger service as part of the Connector trial in Cambridge, UK.

Urban Foresight is running demo rides as part of an autonomous feasibility project on Orkney Island, Scotland. The project, for now running between the local harbor and airport with a Aurrigo shuttle, aims to determine to what extent electric autonomous shuttles can replace the private car and support rural communities.  

BusForFun announced as an official retailer of the Milano Cortina 2026 Paralympic Winter Games tickets. The company offers transportation solutions next to the event ticketing.

Car Sharing/renting 🚗

Zipcar, a subsidiary of Avis Budget Group, lays off 126 US employees and merges its HQ; Zipcar is leaving Boston (current HQ) and will operate out of the Avis HQ in New Jersey. Also recently Zipcar shocked London with a decision to leave the city, where it once operated >3,000 vehicles. These are cost cutting consolidation moves, signaling reduced carsharing focus and appetite for investment. 

Micromobility 🚲🛴

Donkey Republic to raise €10M via private placement as it prepares to uplist for the Nasdaq Copenhagen Main Market. Funds will be used to launch two newly won contracts, totalling deployment of 8,000 new vehicles, and to improve balance sheet; additional debt will be taken to support preparation for the launch of the two tenders. 

Nextbike wins Munich’s public bike share contract - deployment of 7,000 bikes and e-bikes. Lime scales up Milan operations ahead of the Winter Olympics. Beryl introduces new connected pedal bike. 

What went wrong with e-bikes? Cowboy, Rad Power Bikes and VanMoof raised hundreds of millions and valued north of $1 billion - only to go bankrupt and sold in distress. And there are many more smaller brand names - which also failed to scale. 

Cheap VC money caused companies to sell at loss, launch new products without adequate QA and invest in international expansion to grow fast; that translates to money burn. When COVID hit, supply chain challenges hurt customers (think spare parts) which led to increased warranty costs (think inadequate QA) and bad customer experience. When the pandemic faded, it turned out that demand shrunk. And finally, Trump’s tariffs meant that bikes were not not sellable in the US, as the vast majority were built, or had parts produced, in China. Now these companies are thinking about quality, supply chains and mainly - profitability - and are going back to market. 

Delivery - from bikes & cars to bots & drones 🍽🧺

Meituan, China’s largest food delivery and quick commerce platform, acquires DingDong Fresh (NYSE: DDL), dark store-focused quick commerce company. COVID boom which relaxed in the last few years and fierce competition from larger players meant that the deal was right for both sides, with Meituan enhancing operational strength. Interestingly, the deal was only for DingDong’s China business - the company is still active independently overseas. See analysis here. 

Tencent invests in Neolix. While less developed in the Western World, Robovans is a fast growing segment in China. 

Pedal & Post, a cargo-bike delivery logistics company operating in London and Oxford, closes after 14 years. P&P to join Zedify (administration) and Packfleet (transferred operations to DHL), two other low-emission London-based companies who closed shop in the past year. 

How effective are delivery drones in medical deliveries? Not so much according to this study. While drones can save on time (even this is debatable), they increase costs by more than double; are weather dependent and therefore unreliable (thus requiring to keep the ‘legacy’ ground business running, adding even more costs); have not to reach required levels of automation for scaled operations; and are not always needed - in many medical procedures it doesn’t matter if the delivery gets 1-2 hours before or not. 

Swiggy Q3/26 results: 

• Swigy’s food delivery segment witnessed a gross order value (GOV) growth of 20.5% YoY to ₹8,959 crore (±$1.08 billion) 

• In quick commerce (Instamart), GOV rose 103% YoY to ₹7,938 crore (±$960M), while average order value increased about 40% to ₹746 (±$9)

• Revenue up 54% to ₹6,149 crore (±$740M)

• Net loss widens to ₹1,065 crore (±$128M), up from ₹800 crore (±$96M) YoY.

See how Zipline manages delivery operations at the ground pickup station. Zipline has recently been producing cool videos which shed light on drone operations. 

This is just one story (of many) about how we tried, failed, and learned how to improve

www.linkedin.com/posts/keenanwyrobek_this-is-just-one-story-of-many-about-how-ugcPost-7424525021643091968-_Xj7

Baemin adds multilingual, AI-powered support to serve foreigners in South Korea. Languages supported today are English, Chinese, and Japanese. 

AV Freight & Logistics 🚛🚜

Bedrock Robotics raises $270M on a $1.75 billion valuation, to power autonomous construction. Funds will be used to accelerate, well, growth. 

Aston University and Aurrigo partner to help self-driving baggage and cargo vehicles make decisions autonomously.

In other news 📰

Overland AI raises $100M to scale ground autonomy with the U.S. Armed Forces. 

Overland AI Raises $100 Million to Scale Ground Autonomy with U.S. Armed Forces • Overland AI

Apeiron Labs, autonomous underwater robots, raises $9.5M to understand more about oceans. Apeiron is building low-cost vehicles that travel 400 meters up and down the water column, sampling temperature, salinity, and acoustics. Funds will be used to grow the fleet. 

China bans hidden electric car door handles; from January 2027, all cars sold must have a mechanically released external door handle. Over in the US, Tesla is being sued for that same handle, as people simply cannot escape burning cars or are late to be rescued in accidents. This is super important regulation - one that must be adopted in the Western World and can save lives. 

A Glenn Mercer reminder of the Marchetti/Zahavi constant - that people choose to travel 70 minutes a day (or, roughly 30 minutes commute per way). This number cross cultures and time, from ancient Greece to modern India

I love meeting new people and learning about mobility & delivery innovation. Let’s get-to-know.

Let's meet

25 minutes get-to-know / catch-up

app.reclaim.ai/m/Barak-Sas/25min

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Cemre Kavvasoglu is the new North America Operations Director @ ADASTEC. 

Gabe Klein is the new Advisory Board Chair @ Third Lane Mobility (Bird/Spin).

Kamran Chaudhry is the new Director of FP&A @ Blacklane. 

Weiser Manzano is the new Sr. Manager of Transportation at Golden States Warriors.

Congrats and good luck!

Thank you for reading. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

#movingpeople

#movingpeople is a weekly mobility & delivery newsletter - from Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi through Remote-Driving & Delivery Drones to e-bikes and Autonomous Freight & Logistics.

movingpeople.beehiiv.com/subscribe

#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business  - a consultancy focused on Innovation, Growth and Autonomy in the Mobility industry.

Mobility Business | All Things Mobility

Strategy & Corporate Development.
Market Research & Analysis.
Innovation Project Management.
Business Development & Partnerships.

www.movingppl.com

Top Story 1: Week of Trucks - Wabbi + Gatik

Waabi - autonomous trucking - raises $1 billion - in the process extending its Uber partnership to develop robotaxis for Uber. Of that $1 billion, the majority is from Venture funds and $250M is from Uber. Waabi has a partnership with Volvo and commercial pilots (with safety drivers) in the US, but not fully driverless operations as of yet. 

Re Uber partnership, “the company is exclusively partnering with Uber to deploy robotaxis powered by the Waabi Driver on the Uber platform”. Is that really exclusive? In addition, the companies “aim to deploy at least 25,000 vehicles equipped with Waabi’s sensor kit on Uber’s ride-hailing network”. 

Meanwhile

Gatik announce autonomy at scale ("others are still in simulation, we’re in the supply chain"), sharing a mix of commercial and autonomy numbers and achievements: 

• $600M in total contracted revenue secured - the trigger for the announcement 

• Operating 24/7 in Texas, Arizona. Arkansas and Ontario 

• 10 autonomous trucks today, scaling toward ~60 by early 2026

• Over 2,000 hours of driverless operations

• Fully autonomous, no safety driver

Expect an IPO or major investment round soon. 

Top Store 2 - Waymo Hits a Child

Waymo hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica, California. The NHTSA opened an investigation in coordination with the local police. 

According to Waymo, “the pedestrian suddenly entered the roadway from behind a tall SUV… the Waymo Driver braked hard, reducing speed from approximately 17 mph (27 km/h) to under 6 mph (9 km/h) before contact was made”. It further says that “a fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph (22 km/h). This significant reduction in impact speed and severity is a demonstration of the material safety benefit of the Waymo Driver”. 

While Waymo does probably have better reaction times - a human driver might have reasoned that he(/she) is driving near a school at drop-off time, and not driven at that speed in the first place. As a driver, schools always made me extra cautious - children are extremely unpredictive. For perspective - I strongly  suggest reading this LinkedIn post - about the Waymo city driving culture and how it didn’t fit with what was needed in Santa Monica. 

And indeed the NHTSA is investigating "whether the Waymo AV exercised appropriate caution… proximity to the elementary school during drop off hours, and the presence of young pedestrians and other potential vulnerable road users". 

An important reminder - Waymo has a school problem. The company is under investigation for not yielding to school buses, in over 20 incidents. While not directly linked to this accident, it highlights the missing awe robots have near schools.

Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕

Waymo to raise $16 billion on a $110 billion valuation. Of that, Alphabet (Google parent company) will provide $13 billion. The latest round, in November 2024, was a $5.6 billion round on a $45 billion valuation. This is X2.5 in one year. 

Freenow to bring robotaxis to Hamburg - signs MOU with the city. The plan is to have robotaxi complement public transport in urban and peri-urban settings outside of Hamburg’s city centre. No known timeline, no known OEM (Baidu?).

Uber launches “AV Labs” - the new team will collect real world driving data from Uber vehicles’ sensors and provide it to AV tech companies the likes of Waymo and Waabi. For now, Uber is at the prototype phase, with one car on the road, but it definitely has the scale to provide global coverage of driving scenarios. 

42dot - Hyundai's AV unit - recruited a new CEO (X-NVIDIA) and is recruiting engineers. The unit has circa 800 employees, 70% of those R&D. Also reports that Hyundai is considering relying more on NVIDIA’s new autonomous Alpamayo platforms. 

Taxi drivers who work for Uber cannot be deemed automatically as employees, the Court in the Netherlands determines. The Court concluded that the default employment status is self employment, with any deviation to be examined on a per-case (personal) basis, thus reversing a lower Court’s decision. 

Pony AI partners with ATBB, fleet operations, targeting airport and rail autonomous deployments.  Waymo to be fully operational in London by September. In Japan, Waymo is still performing test runs. Video of a Waymo on the freeway at 65 mph (105 km/h). The ComfortDelGro + Pony vehicle is back on the road after an accident with a road divider. As one can expect, CDG blames the human safety operator for intervening. DiDi and GAC (OEM) receive approval to test the new Aion model robotaxi fleet in Guangzhou. Autonomous taxis set for test runs in Kazakhstan, working with both InDrive and Yandex. Tesla approved to begin FSD tests in Israel. 

CaoCao to raise HK$389M (±$50M USD) via sale of company shares. Yango implements PIN codes to increase safety - riders and drivers both receive the same PIN code, to ease identification. Ecab, dispatch software, signs with Frankfurt’s Taxi Now, its first German client. In 2025, Uber Poland launched in 34 new cities.  InDrive is once again the #2 most downloaded ride-hailing app.  

DRT, Bus-Based Mobility & AV shuttles 🚍🚌

WeRide launches commercial operations in Leuven, Belgium. The service is integrated into the public transport network. 

BusUp acquires Iomob (MaaS) and partners with TRIBBU (car sharing) to provide a larger set of mobility solutions. The article has some figures on BusUp: 

• €45M turnover in 2025 (gross, not net revenue)

• 60% of business comes from Latin America

• Operating in 8 countries across the US, Europe and Latin America

• Operates 4,000-5,000 buses and delivers rides to 70,000-80,000 passengers on a daily basis

Enakl, Moroccan-based corporate commute, raises $2.3M. Funds will be used to grow tech stack and client base. Congrats!

SWVL expands to Kuwait with a new $2.2M contract and wins a 5-year $5.5M contract in the UAE. Routematic partners with the Zyoin Group, workforce solutions, to commute its employees. K2 and WeRide sign an MOU to operate autonomous buses in Abu Dhabi. Holon adds to its management team. 

The UK DfT’s Bus franchising manual is published. Written by Arup, this 138-page document “helps LTA officers and leaders to engage stakeholders, to develop and assess the franchise option(s) that suit local needs and local risk appetite, and to implement bus franchise operations”.

January is now behind us - but still at least 86 mobility events are ahead of us. From autonomy to shared mobility to electrification - check out my (free no signup required) 2026 Mobility & Electrification Events Calendar: 

The Ultimate 2026 Mobility & Electrification Events Calendar

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1kv4L4pesy0hBEbjCBDMPnhuPSGaHvqlItfup7BvRJBw/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Car Sharing/renting 🚗

Vay in Las Vegas: 

• Operates 100 Kia Niro SUVs

• Limited to 25 mph (40km/h)

• Starting January 2024, the company has performed over 10,000 remote drives

INVERS 2026 car sharing trends: 

• New regulation to advance autonomous mobility and teledriving

• Most countries shut down 2G and 3G soon

• New EVs and hybrid models are joining fleets

• Asset protection is key to ensure profitability

• Car sharing as part of mobility infrastructure

GreenMobility partners with Viking Assistance to supply replacement electric cars.  

VNV published its 2025 financial report and although it doesn't have Gett anymore, it still holds to BlaBlaCar and to Voi. 

• BlaBlaCar was devalued by 21% in 2025. BlaBla does well in Turkey and India, but regulatory changes relating to energy / transport incentives are challenging the company future outlook

Micromobility 🚲🛴

Still VNV:

• Voi valued up 26%. EBIT profitability, new tenders won (Paris, Oslo, Edinburgh and more) and new credit facilities provide a good outlook for Voi

Berlin orders Nextbike to leave the city; the company operates 6,500 bikes across the city. The order is following a licensing dispute between the City and Nextbike, in which Nextbike lost in court. The company will now need to apply for the license requested by the city. It will be sorted eventually. 

Bird challenges Florence e-scooter ban in court. Not sure this one will sort itself. 

Rad Power Bikes reaches deal to sell itself for $13.2M to Life Electric Vehicles Holdings. The company, which raised a total of $330M and at peak (October 2021) was valued at $1.65 billion(!), entered bankruptcy in late 2025.

Delivery - from bikes & cars to bots & drones 🍽🧺

Zipline explains (2-min video) how it manages operations in tough weather. Manna passes 250,000 deliveries since beginning commercial operations. Keeta marks 1 year of commercial operational drone delivery in Dubai. 

Swiggy integrates with AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and Google Gemini - enabling users to book directly from their preferred LLM. 

Grubhub to remove delivery and service fees on all restaurant orders above $50, in an attempt to win market share.

AV Freight & Logistics 🚛🚜

Chinese trucking tech startup Deepway raises $172M before Hong Kong IPO. 

Swaayatt Robots removes safety driver for the 1st time in an off road operation. See video. 

TRATON commits $25M in dedicated R&D funding to PlusAI and will get a seat on the board. 

In other news 📰

Electreon completes the acquisition of InductEV, creating the largest global wireless vehicle charging company. As it happens, Astara Intelligence wrote about wireless charging this week - key takeaways: 

• Allows reduction of battery size 

• Allows ongoing operations without the need to stop for charging

• For now, best uses cases are logistics centres, port facilities and corporate campuses - closed environment that allow to utilise the infrastructure best

I’ll add to the list of advantages the savings in available space; eliminating the copper theft challenge and vandalism; reducing accidents and misuse; taking away the “I forgot to charge” and potentially solving union challenges. 

Why Red Tape, Not Technology, is Grounding Drone Delivery. A read by James Gleave on the UK and EU regulatory framework and how they stifle innovation and maintain an ever-continuous pilot-stage operation. For more. 

Routing24 launched a new subscription-free route planner tool for transportation and logistics.

I love meeting new people and learning about mobility & delivery innovation. Let’s get-to-know.

Let's meet

25 minutes get-to-know / catch-up

app.reclaim.ai/m/Barak-Sas/25min

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Chris Neil is the new Head of Revenue Operations @ VivaCity. 

Congrats and good luck!

Thank you for reading. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

#movingpeople

#movingpeople is a weekly mobility & delivery newsletter - from Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi through Remote-Driving & Delivery Drones to e-bikes and Autonomous Freight & Logistics.

movingpeople.beehiiv.com/subscribe

#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business  - a consultancy focused on Innovation, Growth and Autonomy in the Mobility industry.

Mobility Business | All Things Mobility

Strategy & Corporate Development.
Market Research & Analysis.
Innovation Project Management.
Business Development & Partnerships.

www.movingppl.com

Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕

Tesla now offers Austin robotaxi service without human safety drivers. But not all vehicles are dropping safety drivers, rather a few vehicles would be fully driverless, and with time more and more. Still, a first. 

Waymo starts offering public robotaxi rides in Miami, its sixth market. 

Miami, Your Waymo Ride Is Ready

Tesla discontinues Autopilot, its basic driver-assistance system, as part of its efforts to encourage FSD subscription and after a Californian judge declared the Autopilot branding a “deceptive marketing” tactic, making it impossible to continue marketing the name in California, Tesla’s largest market.

Grab acquisition of GoTo (Gojek) is facing a hurdle, in the form of Telkomsel, a telecomm company holding 2% of GoTo, which is unhappy with the valuation. For me this signals that the acquisition is close, if they are at the final negotiations stage. 

Rapido’s 2025 financials: 

• Revenue up 44% to '934 cr (€86.7M) 

• Operating loss down to ₹104 crore (€9.6M) from ₹409 crore (€38M) in 2024

• Net loss down by 30% to ₹258 crore (€24M)

Uber investing $7M in Carrum, an Indian fleet-management startup, to scale up premium-vehicle supply. In Kiev, Uklon and Bolt will operate 24/7, despite curfew laws. In total, Uklon will work 24/7 in 19 cities across Ukraine. Gwangju, a city in the South of South Korea, has been chosen to deploy 200 autonomous vehicles, to demonstrate first wide scale autonomous driving. InDrive switches to new maps in Pakistan. Waymo confirms it is in talks with Australian authorities regarding launch. Chinese autonomous vehicles are winning the Gulf states race (over US counterparts). Freenow (by Lyft) partners with Checkout.com for payments. Lemonade, insurance, is offering a personal “Autonomous Car Insurance”, starting with an offering for Tesla's FSD, at extremely low rates. 

Interview with Bolt’s President, Jevgeni Kabanov, on safety, EU regulation, scaling hybrid robotaxi-driver service over the next years and differentiation through rider experience. 

DRT, Bus-Based Mobility & AV shuttles 🚍🚌

I’ve previously covered the UK DfT’s analysis of its Rural Mobility Fund and the DRT best practice guidance it published; my conclusion was that expectations were higher than reality and that at the end of day, these schemes are relevant in mostly rural areas and only as a supplement to fixed-route public transport. Now Roger French published his analysis, and time to look again at some numbers: 

• Schemes range from 3.9 passenger per vehicle hour to 0.9

• The “empty running ratio” for each scheme ranges from 0.45 to 1.09 with a mean value of 0.77 - indicating 77 miles are driven empty for every 100 miles with a passenger on board

How a Zoox ride feels, by Josie-Dee (Seagren) Li, who took 15 rides over the course of a week. The article touches on the purpose design which makes it easier (and futuristic) to experience the ride, from the moment you step in; and on the in-cabin social experience. Cons: slow (in general) and awkward pickups / dropoffs. Read more here. 

I spent my holiday break riding Zoox around San Francisco

Micromobility 🚲🛴

Third Lane Mobility (parent of Bird & Spin) raises $20M from existing investors; funds will be used to deploy up to 35,000 new vehicles in existing cities such as Atlanta, Los Angeles, Nashville, Baltimore, San Francisco, Seattle, Tel Aviv and Rome. 

Lime: selected by the West Midlands (UK) to operate over 2,000 new e-bikes and e-scooters scheme, launch expected in April; troubled in Islington, London and might be out by March. 

Donkey Republic 2026 guidance: 

• Revenue DKK179M-194M (circa €25M), up from expected DKK165M-185M in 2025

• EBIT expected to be DKK 1M-9M (DKK 7.5M = €1M)

New Jersey introduces new e-bike regulation: all e-bikes require insurance; riders have to be over 15 years of age; and e-bikes cannot exceed 28 mph (45 km/h). While this makes NJ one of the most strict states in the US, at least for me it all actually makes sense.

Joco partnered with Walter, a Brooklyn-based social enterprise hiring young adults to manage recycling across its warehouse and fleet facilities.

Delivery - from bikes & cars to bots & drones 🍽🧺

Zipline receives $600M in new investment; valuation at $7.6 billion. Funds will be used for US expansion. Last week I reported on Wing and Walmart expanding to an additional 150 sites - this raise is part of a larger play in the US, which sees delivery drones being fully certified soon to become a daily part of life. Europe? Not even close.

The Indian government is asking e-commerce companies to stop 10-minute deliveries, following the government’s attempt to bring gig-workers under national labour laws and massive workers’ demonstrations over lack of safety and general working conditions and pay. Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy have all committed to change the language and delivery times regarding 10-minute deliveries. 

Foodpanda Singapore launches XL stores - more inventory, wider selection.

In other news 📰

Eve Air Mobility secured a $150M financing round to accelerate R&D. 

Wonder acquires Claim, a restaurant rewards app, and plans to integrate that with Grubhub. 

ABZ Innovation, industrial and agricultural drones, raises $8.2M. 

Serve Robotics is acquiring Diligent Robotics, a hospital assistant robot company, giving Diligent a $29M valuation (Diligent raised $75M). This is a first venture outside of food deliveries for Serve, which is interested in additional acquisitions. 

Why Serve Robotics is acquiring a hospital assistant robot company | TechCrunch

I love meeting new people and learning about mobility & delivery innovation. Let’s get-to-know.

Let's meet

25 minutes get-to-know / catch-up

app.reclaim.ai/m/Barak-Sas/25min

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Darian Heim is a new Member of UITP On-Demand Mobility Committee @ UITP. 

Patrick Lutnig is the new Marketing & Content Manager @ MAN Truck & Bus. 

Yannick Ntibansiga is the new Transportation Analyst and Modeller @ TransLink.

Congrats and good luck!

Thank you for reading. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

#movingpeople

#movingpeople is a weekly mobility & delivery newsletter - from Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi through Remote-Driving & Delivery Drones to e-bikes and Autonomous Freight & Logistics.

movingpeople.beehiiv.com/subscribe

#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business  - a consultancy focused on Innovation, Growth and Autonomy in the Mobility industry.

Mobility Business | All Things Mobility

Strategy & Corporate Development.
Market Research & Analysis.
Innovation Project Management.
Business Development & Partnerships.

www.movingppl.com

Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕

Gett is in talks to sell its UK operations for an estimated $50M. Gett was acquired for $188M circa six months ago, and operates in the UK and in Israel, where it is a market leader with >80% market share. The identity of the buyer is unknown; it could be anyone from Uber to ComfortDelGro to Bolt. To be continued. 

And still in the UK, CMAC (a ComforDelGro subsidiary) acquires minicabit, a website to compare and book cheap minicabs (taxis). 

InDrive diversifies by adding grocery deliveries and ads - following the steps of other ride-hailers. Advertising is being rolled out across markets including Nigeria, Mexico, Colombia, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Egypt, and Morocco. Grocery is being introduced in Pakistan. 

Yelo is a “Uber for Gen Z” that recently launched in the US, offering a pay less, never FOMO and ride friendly. The company is targeting launch in 19 cities over the next month. 

Angkas partners with Igloo to provide insurance for 20,000 rides. Through this partnership, personal accident insurance can be activated for a minimum premium of 52 cents per ride. 

Namma Yatri enters the corporate market via a partnership with OneBanc, corporate payroll & expense platform, 

Gig-economy regulation in Israel is moving forward. On Sunday the new bill passed the first (of quite many) steps, and will now travel through parliament. Best case scenario, assuming the bill doesn’t fall, expect ride-hailing to start in Q3. 

In Canada, Uber is fighting the Halifax region from imposing new licensing requirements. A new regulation will require ride-hailing drivers to submit their background checks and training to the municipality - and not to the ride-hailing company - which is the same way other taxi drivers are getting licensed today. How much more would it cost drivers? $135 in onboarding fees and additional $100 every two years. Not much really. 

Motional (Hyundai-backed) targets commercial robotaxi service in Las Vegas by the end of 2026. For now Motional runs an autonomous vehicle in the city, with a safety driver, for employees only, which acts like a robotaxi. The company uses IONIQ 5 vehicles. 

WeRide is live on WeChat. Apollo Go and AutoGo launched a robotaxi service in Abu Dhabi, available to the public through the AutoGo app. Waymo plans to launch in Australia this year. New York Governor plans to introduce legislation that would legalise robotaxis in the state - but for now not in NYC. 

Tesla removes the option to get FSD via a one-time payment. Moving forward, only a monthly subscription will be possible; the price currently stands at $99. Reaching “10 million active FSD subscriptions” is also one of the milestones in Musk’s $1 trillion package. 

Can autonomous vehicles be taken to a car-wash? An excellent question by Lukas Neckermann - with no clear answer. The question has to do with maintenance costs and utilisation; but it reminds us that the switch to autonomous won’t be operationally easy. 

In San Francisco, Zoox robotaxi strikes a parked car, injuring a person in the process. Per Zoox: “a robotaxi was traveling straight on 15th Street when the driver of a parked vehicle suddenly opened their door into the path of the robotaxi. The robotaxi identified the opening door and tried to avoid it but contact was unavoidable”. 

Zoox autonomous car struck vehicle, injuring S.F. street worker

Waymo gets stuck on the light rail and a passenger gets off the car. The car eventually moved on (still driving on a light rail track) but only after the light rail had to stop and let the Waymo ‘wake up’. See here: 

Instagram post

A Phil Koopman deep-dive into Waymo’s school bus problem. In short: Waymo vehicles have been violating traffic rules next to US school buses; have since been taken for a software recall; and still the problem continues. 

DRT, Bus-Based Mobility & AV shuttles 🚍🚌

Flix acquires Flibco, a European digital airport-transfer platform, operating in seven European countries. Flibco will continue to operate as a separate unit, with backend integrations expected soon. 

A L4 self-driving bus runs on public roads in greater Tokyo for the first time; it has been running at L2 since 2019. The entire route is 2.6km - the L4 ODD is 700 meters of that route. 

A ComfortDelGro + Pony.ai autonomous vehicle crashes into a road divider. Bumper slightly damaged. The company says this happened while transitioning to a human driver. 

Read an interview with Eran Ofir, Imagry’s CEO, on the company’s vision-based, no HD maps, no Lidar, autonomous tech (similar to Tesla and Wayve).

89 events and counting - a comprehensive list of mobility and electrification events:

The Ultimate 2026 Mobility & Electrification Events Calendar

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kv4L4pesy0hBEbjCBDMPnhuPSGaHvqlItfup7BvRJBw/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Car Sharing/renting 🚗

GreenMobility’s 2025 preliminary numbers & guidance for 2026; starting with 2025 realised non-audited numbers:

• Revenue up 20% to €20.6M (DKK 154M)

• EBITDA up 55% to €7.1M (DKK 53M)

• Cash at bank and in hand grew to €2.28M (grew by DKK 10M, to DKK 17M)

And 2026 guidance: 

• Revenue growth of 8-12%

•  EBITDA growth of 12-16%

Micromobility 🚲🛴

Bolt has a new - fully in-house designed - bike. The bike, to be first introduced in Barcelona, has solar panels to power the connected systems while the bike is idle; and a forward-facing AI camera that can detect unsafe behaviour, recognise parking racks and assess proximity to pedestrians. 

The Meddin Bike-sharing World Map is looking for a sponsor. Currently Lyft sponsors the map - who here wants to replace them? 

The Meddin Bike-sharing World Map

Your description

bikesharingworldmap.com/#/all/2.5/0/51.5

Micromobility crime. From theft to joyrides, some estimate that up to 10% of a bike-sharing fleet can be stolen or destroyed annually. Crime is more common in transport hubs (+35%), student zones (+31%) and nightlife districts (+27%). MineCrime collects crime data, creating geospatial analytics and risk modeling, to help micromobility operators combat crime. 

Ireland considers making e-scooter helmets compulsory. 

Luna Systems, AI-powered camera systems, raises €1.5M to bring Advanced Rider Assistance Systems (ARAS) to cyclists and motorcyclists. 

Delivery - from bikes & cars to bots & drones 🍽🧺

NYC vs. delivery apps:

• $550M. A new report by the city's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection finds that delivery workers have lost as much as $550M in tips since Uber and DoorDash changed their apps so that the tip option appears only after customers place their orders. 

• 76¢ per delivery. The average tip on UberEats and DoorDash - compared to $2.17 on apps that offer the option to tip before checkout.

• $5,800 - the annual loss in tips per worker.

• January 26th. A new law, requiring to offer the option to tip at or before checkout, is due to come into effect. 

DoorDash and Uber are suing the city over the introduction of the new bill. This whole bizarre affair feels more like Moscow than New York. 

In India, the Labour Ministry recently held meetings with senior leaders of Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy and Zomato to discuss delivery timelines and the pressure faced by gig workers - leading Blinkit to drop the ‘10-minute delivery’ messaging. Others are expected to follow. 

Amazon is testing delivery drones in Darlington, UK. Commercial services are expected later this year. 

In Miami, a malfunctioned UberEats delivery bot was wrecked after being hit by a commuter train. 

A funny video of delivery bots in China plowing through tough conditions. 

AV Freight & Logistics 🚛🚜

2 million tonnes of limestone in 8 months. Pronto’s autonomous tech is powering Heidelberg Materials’ fleet of haul trucks

Pronto Announces Industry Milestone: North America’s First Fully Autonomous Mixed-Fleet Quarry Surpasses Two Million Tons Hauled

McLeod, transportation management systems (TMS) for trucking, integrates with Aurora, allowing trucking businesses to book and manage autonomous truck capacity using their existing TMS.

In other news 📰

What if shared mobility didn’t feel shared? introducing Pliyt. 

I love meeting new people and learning about mobility & delivery innovation. Let’s get-to-know.

Let's meet

25 minutes get-to-know / catch-up

app.reclaim.ai/m/Barak-Sas/25min

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Luc Hall is the new Head of Business Development @ Bikmo.

Lukas Teschner is the new Strategy & Operations Principal @ Via UK. 

Shengyu Jin is the new Autonomous Vehicle System Technical Leader @ ORI AI LTD

Congrats and good luck!

Thank you for reading. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.

#movingpeople

#movingpeople is a weekly mobility & delivery newsletter - from Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi through Remote-Driving & Delivery Drones to e-bikes and Autonomous Freight & Logistics.

movingpeople.beehiiv.com/subscribe