The Station - More micromobility layoffs, digging into the Mobileye S-1 and a Rivian recall

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

Welp, this week delivered a firehose of news. Shall we jump in?

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Micromobbin'

The big news of this week was, sadly, more layoffs in the micromobility world.

Tier laid off about 10% of its Spin staff, including a number of executives. The company is also exiting Canada and Seattle. Spin told its workforce that U.S. demand had been underwhelming and rising inflation and a tightening VC funding environment led to the need to tighten the purse strings.

While the layoffs affected corporate teams — including engineering, partnerships and policy, community partnerships and HR, according to a source familiar with the matter — the operations teams were largely unaffected. One industry insider told TechCrunch that might be because Tier can handle many of those tasks, but would still need help on the ground when it decides to send over its new e-scooters.

The micromobility sector has struggled in 2022. A number of companies, including Bird, Superpedestrian and Voi have cut staff. Many of those layoffs occurred over the summer, but now it seems another wave of layoffs is washing over the industry.

Spin wasn’t the only micromobility company that has made cuts this month. Zoomo also suffered some layoffs this week. The Aussie company downsized its global workforce by 16%.

In other news …

Barcelona is doing a one-year pilot project using the energy recovered from metro trains braking to charge personal e-scooters. *Chef’s kiss!* Two of my favorite things — public transit and micromobility.

Biking and walking are the happiest ways to transport your body, research shows. In case you needed reminding of a way to make your days suck less.

In Denver, scooter ridership is taking off and the city is backing it by framing micromobility as a traffic solution and making changes to laws and infrastructure to ensure safety of riders.

India’s Hero MotoCorp has launched its first electric scooter worldwide.

Joyride has launched its Delivery-as-a-Service product that helps micromobility fleet owners manage delivery vehicles that are leased to gig workers. The DaaS service includes software, hardware and support.

The North American Bikeshare and Scootershare Association (NABSA) has transferred ownership of GBFS to MobilityData. GBFS is the common format to share real-time statuses of shared mobility systems. This data can be shared with cities, or it can be used by trip planning applications like Google Maps to help travelers find shared e-bikes and e-scooters.

A New York City Council member is pushing a bill that will allow New Yorkers to benefit from ratting out owners of vehicles blocking bike lanes or entrances/exits of school buildings, sidewalks and crosswalks. The bill would give an individual 25% of a proposed $175 ticket. New Yorkers aren’t snitches, but they are hustlers, so who knows?

Okai released an over-the-air update to its Okai EB50 e-bike that lets users significantly increase the top speed limit of the bike from 20 mph to 28 mph. This might actually have regulatory implications and put the bike outside of e-bike territory and subject to motor vehicle law.

Pedal Ahead’s loan-to-own program in San Diego gives low-income riders access to e-bikes in exchange for their riding data.

Yamaha has launched three new e-bikes for gravel riders, mountain bikers and urban commuters.

Deal of the week

Five years ago, Intel bought Mobileye for $15.3 billion. Now, Mobileye is on the path to becoming a publicly traded company.

The company outs a broad vision: An autonomous future “where congestion is seen only in history books.” But its S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission underscores its precarious position in the ever-evolving self-driving vehicle industry, Jaclyn Trop reports in a recent TC+ article.

Tl;dr: the company, which has carved out massive market share by supplying automakers with computer vision technology to power their advanced driver assistance systems, is facing pressure from supply chain constraints and a trend among OEMs to become more vertically integrated.

The S-1 did contain some brights spots though, including long-term partnerships with China’s Geely, Great Wall Motors and SAIC, and Indian automakers such as Mahindra & Mahindra position it for growth in an emerging market.

Other deals that got my attention …

Canada Drives closed a $7.3 million round to expand its online car shopping/delivery platform into new markets. The raise comes a few months after raising $30 million.

Halo Car, a Las Vegas-based startup that combines teleoperations and car sharing, raised $5 million in a seed round led by climate tech fund At One Ventures, with participation from T-Mobile Ventures, Earthshot Ventures and existing investor Boost VC.

Ibeo Automotive Systems, a lidar company, filed for insolvency, according to The Robot Report. The company said it is continuing operations in all divisions in Hamburg, Germany, Eindhoven, Netherlands, and Detroit, Michigan.

Phantom Auto acquired video communications company Voysys AB to bolster its teleoperations platform that used to remotely operate forklifts, yard trucks and delivery robots. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Quanergy’s board approved a reverse stock split of its outstanding shares of common stock. The reverse stock split went into effect October 6.

Velodyne Lidar acquired Bluecity, a Montreal-based AI software company in an all-stock transaction.

Wunder Mobility raised €12 million to help it expand its service of providing software and hardware solutions to shared micromobility and shared car operators.

Notable reads and other tidbits

Autonomous vehicles

Chicago’s city council approved a pilot program for sidewalk robots to start delivering food in the city. The city’s Department of Business Affairs & Consumer Protection will issue two-year permits to companies within the pilot, which will jointly managed by that department and Chicago’s DOT.

Gatik, the AV company focused on the middle mile, and Canadian food and pharmacy retailer Loblaw launched fully driverless commercial operations. Gatik has been working with Loblaw since 2020. It will move select online grocery orders for Loblaw’s PC Express service with a fleet of multi-temperature autonomous box trucks (without a human driver behind the wheel).

Mobileye quietly finished off its autonomous vehicle testing pilot in New York City more than a year ago, but we’re all just finding out about it now. The company had been in the city for around five months, and it’s possible that the same way-too-strict regulations that kept others like Waymo and Cruise from deploying AVs in NYC could have led to Mobileye pulling out prematurely.

When Mobileye launched its testing program in NYC in July 2021, it was the only company with New York’s AV testing permit. The DMV told TechCrunch that no companies currently hold a testing permit in the state.

We have lots of questions about what went down here, but Mobileye would only say that it was happy with the testing and frequently rotates test vehicles into new cities, like adding Miami and Detroit this year, and plans to keep doing so.

Motional will put its robotaxis on the Uber network later this year as part of a 10-year operating agreement that will eventually roll out to major cities across North America. TechCrunch interviewed Akshay Jaising, who is heading up commercialization efforts at Motional about the company’s progress. Look out for the interview this coming Monday. 

Zipline, the autonomous drone delivery and logistics company, started dropping prescriptions and over-the-counter medications to homes in the Salt Lake City area.

Electric vehicles, charging & batteries

Honda unveiled the 2024 Honda Prologue, its first-ever battery-electric SUV.

Michigan is becoming the US epicenter of battery manufacturing.

Rivian has issued a voluntary recall of all 13,000 vehicles it has delivered so far due to a loose fastener. The fastener, which may not have been sufficiently torqued on a small percentage of vehicles, connects the front upper control arm and steering knuckle. This can cause loose and vibrating tires, wheel tilt and loss of steering control.

Sixt said it plans to buy more than 100,000 electric vehicles from Chinese automaker BYD for its European rental fleet between now and 2028.

Tesla dominated the news cycle once again.

• The automaker delivered 343,830 vehicles in the third quarter, a record number that still failed to meet analysts’ expectations. There was also a larger-than-usual gap between production and delivery numbers.
• The Tesla Semi is officially in production with Pepsi taking the first deliveries.
• Tesla is removing ultrasonic sensors from Model 3 and Model Y vehicles, the next step in CEO Elon Musk’s plan to only use cameras and software to support its advanced driver assistance system and other active safety features.

Volvo will supply Amazon with 20 electric trucks for deliveries in Germany. The trucks are manufactured in Sweden alongside traditional trucks, which means the company has capacity to scale up to meet future demand, according to Volvo.

Future of flight

Joby Aviation and Skyports Infrastructure are developing a Living Lab passenger terminal where the companies can virtually test a variety of technologies and procedures to help define how passengers experience vertical flight in the future.

Volocopter conducted its first crewed public test flight in Italy.

Wisk Aero unveiled its go-to-market aircraft: a four-passenger autonomous air taxi that the startup will put forward for U.S. Federal Aviation Administration type certification.

People

Apple has added 15 more drivers to its program, according to the California DMV, MacReports reported. Cruise also reduced the size of its driver team and nearly doubled the size of its driverless fleet.

General Motors added former Tesla and Lyft executive Jon McNeill to its board of directors.

Faraday Future executive chairperson Sue Swenson and directors Scott Vogel and Jordan Vogel resigned from all positions on the FFIE board after receiving death threats.

Nikola Corp. appointed Andrew Vesey to its board. Vesey, who is president and CEO North America at Fortescue Future Industries, will replace DeWitt Thompson.

Rivian hired Diane Lye as its first chief information officer. It’s a bit surprising that this critical position wasn’t filled years ago.

Uber’s former head of security Joseph Sullivan was found guilty of criminal obstruction for attempting to cover up a data breach that saw tens of millions of customer and driver records stolen.

Waabi has brought on Dustin Koehl as its new head of transportation. Koehl has a deep background in the trucking industry.

• Information Services Administrator at New Mexico State University Foundation (Las Cruces, NM, USA)
• NETWORK SYSTEM OPERATIONS ADMINISTRATOR II at Navopache Electric Cooperative, Inc. (Pinetop-Lakeside, AZ, USA)
• SCADA Systems Engineer at Navopache Electric Cooperative, Inc. (Pinetop-Lakeside, AZ, USA)
• Senior Software Engineer (C#/.NET Core/WebAPI) at Jack Henry™ (United States)
• Business Systems Supervisor at Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission (Middletown, PA, United States)

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