Features
20 Sep 18

BMW and Daimler plan to headquarter mobility company in Berlin

At the end of March 2018, BMW Group and Daimler announced they would set up a joint venture to develop a mobility services powerhouse. Now both partneers announce that they plan to locate the headquarters of their global mobility company in Berlin, the capital of their home market, and so outside of their respective group structures in Munich (BMW) and Stuttgart (Daimler). 

“Our vision is to create a major global player for seamless and intelligent connected mobility services together. As a hub for creativity and innovation, Berlin is exactly the right location for our plans,” according to Dieter Zetsche, Chairman of the Board of Management of Daimler AG and head of Mercedes-Benz Cars. 

“The future of mobility is being shaped in major cities like Berlin. With the ecosystem we are planning, we will create solutions for tomorrow's urban mobility: intelligent, seamlessly connected and available at the tap of a finger. We believe this will improve quality of life in major cities,” explained Harald Krüger, Chairman of the Board of Management of BMW AG. 

European Commission
The two companies took also a new step towards forming their joint venture by officially filing the transaction with the European Commission.

What are we talking about? The two German based premium car manufacturers create a joint venture to combine and expand their on-demand offering in the areas of carsharing, ride-hailing, parking, charging and multimodality. This equally-owned joint venture will comprise services in the following areas:

1) Multimodal and On-Demand Mobility with moovel from Daimler and ReachNow from BMW Group serves more than 5 million users with seamless connectivity between different mobility offerings – including booking and payment. 

2) Carsharing with Car2Go (Daimler) and DriveNow (BMW Group) is operating 20,000 vehicles in 31 cities. 

3) Ride-hailing with mytaxi, Chauffeur Privé, Clever Taxi and Beat can count 15.9 million passengers and more than 170,000 drivers that are using the services.

4) Parking with ParkNow of BMW Group and Parkmobile Group/Parkmobile LLC from Daimler has to strenghten the offer in ticketless, cashless on-street parking or help reserving and paying for off-street parking in a garage: P

5) Charging with ChargeNow and Digital Charging Solutions gives access (incl. location, charging and payment) to a network of public charging stations with more than 192,000 charging points worldwide. 

Picture copyright: Daimler AG

 

Authored by: Steven Schoefs