One sentence revealed what is at stake: “As pioneers in automotive engineering, we will not leave the task of shaping future urban mobility to others,” Daimler boss Dieter Zetsche said in a joint press release with BMW.
Mercedes-maker Daimler and BMW, the world’s number one and two makers of luxury cars respectively, announced that they would merge their car-sharing, ride-hailing, parking and charging services to “become a leading provider of innovative mobility services.”
The two carmakers are responding to growing competition in the ride-hailing market from the likes of Uber, Lyft and Didi and electric carmaker Tesla, as well as Drivy, Snappcar and Turo,which offer alternative platforms that allow consumers to hire cars directly from other individuals.
Both BMW and Daimler have been slowly building up their competing services. The Munich-based carmaker owns car-sharing company DriveNow, known as ReachNow in the United States. Daimler operates Car2go, the ride-hailing app mytaxi and Chauffeur Privé. Not all of these operations are profitable and merging them could make it easier to turn the losses into earnings. Scale is crucial, especially in the car-sharing business.
