Two of Germany’s largest automakers see a growing market in urban mobility. Now, BMW and Daimler are pooling their mobility services to transform that market.
Together, they are investing more than €1 billion and establishing five joint ventures: REACH NOW for multimodal services, CHARGE NOW for charging, FREE NOW for taxi ride-hailing, PARK NOW for parking and SHARE NOW for car-sharing.
The two companies anticipate that these joint ventures will create up to 1,000 new jobs worldwide.
“We have a clear vision: these five services will merge ever more closely to form a single mobility service portfolio with an all-electric, self-driving fleet of vehicles that charge and park autonomously and interconnect with the other modes of transport,” Harald Krüger, Management Board Chairman of BMW AG, said in a press release.
Dieter Zetsche, Chairman of the Board of Management at Daimler AG and Head of Mercedez-Benz Cars sees the new business area as the next strategic step. “But our new portfolio for individual urban mobility on demand represents a logical extension to the value chain.”
The two companies believe that the future of mobility will be decided in cities, which is why they decided to headquarter their new organizations in Berlin, a city they describe as a “hub of creativity and innovation”.
