The Station - Arrival restructures (again), Bird shrinks and highlights from Disrupt

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. 

Wow, what a week over here at TechCrunch! Our annual tech bonanza (I can’t even call it a conference) was a flurry of activity. Our expo floor was packed, the roundtables were oversubscribed and the two stages showcased some of the most interesting people in tech.

The event culminated as it always does: naming the Startup Battlefield winner.

That process started with the Startup Battlefield 200, handpicked companies (from thousands of applications) that were vetted and chosen to exhibit on the expo floor. From here, 20 startups were selected to compete in Startup Battlefield, where founders pitched before judges for a chance to win $100,000 and the coveted Battlefield Cup. We winnowed it down to five finalists: Advanced Ionics, AppMap, Intropic Materials, Minerva Lithium and Swap Robotics. The judges who reviewed the final five were Mar Hershenson (Pear VC), Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone, Aileen Lee (Cowboy Ventures), TechCrunch editor in chief Matthew Panzarino, David Tisch (BoxGroup) and Richard Wong (Accel).

In the end, the crown went to Minerva Lithium, a company co-founded by Sheeba Dawood and Hemali Rathnayake that wants to change the way we extract lithium. 

Minerva has come up with a coordinated polymer framework that extracts critical materials from salt water in just three days and without all the harmful effects on the environment. Minerva can not only extract lithium, which it can sell at battery-grade to battery makers, it can also capture other minerals and possibly purify the leftover water for drinking purposes. 

Congrats to Minerva Lithium!

Oh, before I forget: we’ve opened up pre-registration for 2-for-1 tickets so sign up and we’ll let you know when you can secure your seat at next year’s event.

You can always email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, opinions or tips. You also can send a direct message to @kirstenkorosec

Takeaways from Rivian and Lyft

I interview Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe and Lyft co-founder and president Jon Zimmer during Disrupt.

Both interviews provided some interesting insights on the challenges of founding and growing a company. There was even a little news in there. Here are some highlights from both.

Lyft, Jon Zimmer

On past challenges:
• It wasn’t Covid, but the sustained and early fight with Uber that Zimmer believes was the hardest challenge that company has faced to date.
On autonomous vehicles:
“I think it’s too early to pick you know, one winner and so today, it’s about having multiple partners. Ten years from now? It’s too hard to predict.”
On Tesla FSD and whether Lyft should tell drivers not to use while shuttling riders:
“We do not have have a policy currently. You know, we think that the regulatory bodies are best, you know, when it comes to that level of safety.”
On the Biden Administration proposal:
“The recent Biden Administration proposal that you’re talking about basically just returns things to the way they were in the Obama administration where all our drivers were independent contractors. Typically, we are governed at a state level. Federal Government is important and matters for all industries, but it’s really interpreted at the state level, of which I would argue we’ve made significant progress over the last few years, California being one example.”

Rivian, RJ Scaringe

On the future product front:
• More than half of Rivian’s 15,000 employees are working on future product pipeline, including the R2 platform, which will focus on smaller and cheaper vehicles
• Yes, there will be 400-mile “Max Pack.” Scaringe didn’t provide a timeline.
• Micromobility, specifically an e-bike will be part of the lineup

On the recall:
• A “significant majority” of the more than 12,000 vehicles that were recalled earlier this month.
• “It was really powerful for us to respond so quickly, and I think what we saw from customers — of course, there’s frustration on anything like this — but that we were trying to do the best possible job we could. We were authentic about it. We didn’t we didn’t sugarcoat it. We said we’re gonna go fix this. And so it actually has been really quite positive.”
On the supply chain:
• Think the semiconductor chip shortage was bad? Scaringe said that shortage is “an appetizer to the degree of the sort of supply chain constraint we’re likely to see across the battery supply chain over the next 15 years.” Woof.
• “The battery supply chain as we know it for lithium-ion batteries, whether you’re looking at lithium hydroxide or lithium carbonate was built largely around consumer electronics and so it’s very small. It’s not a huge supply chain. And so it has to grow by 20x or on the order of 20x over the next 10 to 15 years. And so the level of investment needed to go build that is is staggering. And moreover, I think the level of risk concentration given that it hasn’t been built in the United States is a real thing.”

Micromobbin'

The big micromobbin’ news this week fell squarely into the gloomy category. I’m talking about Bird and its plans to exit several markets across the world, including Germany, Sweden, Norway and “several dozen additional, primarily small to mid-sized markets” across the US, Europe and the Middle East.

Deliveroo is partnering with Volt to trial the use of e-bikes for food delivery in the UK.

Niu launched a new kick scooter, the KQi3 Max. It has a serious top speed of 20 miles per hour and a 40.4-mile range.

NYC’s Meatpacking District has a vision to turn its cobble-stoned streets into ones that are safer for bikers and walkers and more lucrative for businesses. I noticed moves towards making the trendy area more pedestrian-friendly when I was in the neighborhood recently, and it appears that will only increase with proposals for new bike lanes, improved traffic patterns, pedestrian plazas and more green space.

The Onion lays out some of the pros and cons of e-bikes. ;D

Tier did an analysis of ridership data from the 24 countries it operates in and found its service has allowed riders to replace 48 million kilometers of car journeys, avoiding 8 million kilograms of CO2 emissions.

VanMoof’s new A5 and S5 e-bikes offer a smooth ride and some serious anti-theft technology.

Voi says its summer 2022 survey shows that a third of Birmingham riders used Voi for commuting back and forth to work.

— Rebecca Bellan

Deal of the week

TechCrunch Disrupt kept me pretty busy, but a few deals got my attention. One news item that rose to the top of the heap was Mobileye setting terms of its IPO. The company, which plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol MBLY, plans to offer 41 million shares at $19 a share, the assumed midpoint

Bain Capital and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority completed their acquisition of MerchantsFleet, a fleet management company based in New Hampshire.

EQT AB is exploring a sale of North American bus services operator First Transit, Bloomberg reported citing unnamed sources. The company plans to keep First School, the American school bus division.

Freebee, the Miami-based on-demand transportation company raised $8 million in a Series A funding round led by BP Ventures with support Tensile Mobility.

MaxAB, an Egyptian-based B2B food and grocery delivery service, raised $40 million in a pre-Series B round from ADQ’s venture capital platform DisruptAD, the British International Investment (BII) and Silver Lake.

Mullen Automotive finalized its $240 million acquisition of Electric Last Mile Solutions.

Spirit Airlines shareholders approved a $3.8 billion takeover offer by JetBlue Airways.

Notable news and other tidbits

Autonomous vehicles

During Disrupt, I squeezed in a short and memorable ride in one of Cruise’s driverless vehicles. The ride itself was fairly uneventful. I was given access to the app by Cruise and was able to hail the vehicle about 30 minutes before the normal operating hours began. It’s possible that my ride won’t mirror what current customers experience because I was in a vehicle used by employees.

My ride was uneventful (hooray, no phantom braking or sudden, unexplained actions). However, the Cruise vehicle would not turn right on red, which clearly annoyed the human drivers behind it. On one occasion, a vehicle ripped by the Cruise vehicle in an effort to pass before the next light; that’s not exactly ideal.

The user interface inside the vehicle (so the displays) allows customers to view a map or play various music mixes. As far as I could tell there wasn’t a way to actually skip through songs. There was also a big giant “End Ride” button, which again seems like a good feature to have.

My takeaway from this admittedly brief ride is that Cruise has made considerable progress on the commercial front; I’d feel comfortable using the service. However, I’d like to see refinements on the UI and UX side of things and hope that vehicles adopt a more confident driving style and start taking those right turns.

Meanwhile, Waymo said it plans to launch a robotaxi service in Los Angeles.

Electric vehicles, charging & batteries

Arrival is restructuring again and turning its attention away from the UK and towards the U.S. market.

BMW said it plans to invest $1.7 billion to build at least six EV models in the U.S. by the end of the decade.

The Department of Energy announced that 20 battery companies will receive a combined $2.8 billion to build and expand commercial-scale facilities in 12 states. Sila, one of the companies, received $100 million.

Gene Berdichevsky of battery chemistry company Sila talked to TechCrunch one year after our original interview to get his take on the super hot battery industry. A few of his insights:
• The Inflation Reduction Act is a very American piece of legislation – meaning the U.S. took its time getting to it, but when it finally enacted this piece of climate legislation, it was a ‘Go big or go home’ situation.
• There’s no way U.S. battery companies today can scale to meet immediate EV demand. By 2030, it should start to level out.
• New lines are being drawn for investments into battery materials companies.
• As a battery maker, having an OEM in your corner will help you avoid a lot of the pitfalls of supply constraints.

Foxconn unveiled two EV concepts at its third annual Hon Hai Tech Day – a Model V electric pickup truck and Model B electric crossover hatchback.

General Motors revealed the production Cadillac Celestiq. It is big in every way and has some interesting features. But will consumers plunk down the $300,000 (or more) to buy it?

The automaker also unveiled the GMC Sierra EV – its third vehicle under the GMC brand.

Mercedes-Benz AG will source lithium hydroxide to build batteries for electric vehicles from Vancouver-based mining startup Rock Tech Lithium.

Rolls-Royce said it plans to deliver its first EV, the Spectre two-door coupe, to customers late next year.

Tesla Q3 earnings were released. Tl;dr: revenue of $21.45 billion, which was just short of expectations; net income of $3.3 billion (nearly double from the same year-ago period); reiterated guidance on Semi and 50% annual growth on vehicle sales. The energy unit was a bright spot.

Car-sharing and ride-hailing

Lyft is increasing its service fees to make up for the rising costs of insurance due to inflationary pressures.

Turo is expanding its peer-to-peer car-sharing platform to Australia.

Uber is doubling down on advertising with a new ad business unit and in-app ads in an attempt to drive more revenue.

In-car tech and apps

Apple is bringing its immersive surround-sound audio product to vehicles through a partnership with Mercedes-Benz and Universal Music Group.

Drivr is a new startup that is launching a crowdsourced tipping platform that uses data science to map delivery drivers to neighborhoods.

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