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The city of Miami hosted its first Formula One Grand Prix. The European racing event has attracted American fans in droves, thanks to the franchise that is called Formula 1: Drive to Survive. Tech that showed up on track was looked around for by Trop. What got her attention was here.
We kicked off Mobility month with a live event featuring Rachel Holt of Construct Capital and Kevin Bennett of Caribou. This coming week, Waabi founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun will join us to talk about raising monster rounds.
On Wednesday at 11:30 am and 2:30 pm, the live shows are recorded. You can register for free and gain access to Waabi's pitch deck, pitch practice session and the livestream where you can ask the speakers questions.
The agenda is out for the sessions. VW CEO Herbert Diess will be our only online interview. The event will be held in San Mateo, Calif., on May 18 and May 19. I hope to see you there. The creators of Aurora, Nuro and Zoox, as well as Charlie Miller and Chris Valesek, who are notorious car hackers, will be featured in the Mobility section of the sessions.
There is a little offer for everyone.
The first 50 people to buy a discounted general admission pass will get a free expo pass. You can use the promo code at checkout or click the link to get the general admission pass. The general admission ticket is usually $295.
You can email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com if you have any questions. You can send a direct message to the person at the social media site.
The risk of scooters falling over on the sidewalks is one of the main reasons cities don't allow them on the sidewalks. Voi tried to combat this with computer vision-based pilots. The company has a partnership with the Lazarillo app, which helps to improve mobility and accessibility for blind and visually impaired people.
The app gives users voice messages with information about nearby places, the street they are walking on, and more. Users of the app will be able to see if a Voi scooter is parked in their way. Users will be able to report poorly parked scooters directly to Voi.
The service is available in three UK cities and should reach more in the future.
MicromobilityAs someone with first-hand knowledge of the city, I can say that it has terrible access to mobility, from inefficient public transport to scarce bike lanes. Most people drive everywhere, which contributes to climate change.
The city's 2020 Climate Action Plan called for a 64% cut in transport emissions by 2030. The Regional Land Transport plan has been allocated $306 million, but the board of Auckland Transport has been told that it is not enough. The plan calls for $2 billion in order to achieve 260 km of cycling connections by the year 2030.
In San Diego, the city is proposing more than 20 new rules for e-scooters, including requiring companies to use technology to alert users when they ride into illegal areas and requiring operators to respond to scooter complaints within an hour.
The city is considering limiting the number of vendors to between two and four. The annual fee for each company could go up to $20,000 if approved.
The proposed rules are due for a vote in May and could be implemented in July.
Less than a year after it launched, Lime quietly killed off its electric moped sharing program in NYC. The company said it wants to focus on its e-scooter pilot in the city, but it may be having a hard time standing up against its well-established competition.
The Formula One festival has come up with something green. A champion of the international racing organization, Fernando Alonso, has launched an e-bike during the Miami Grand Prix, and it actually looks amazing. The Kimoa e-bike is made of 3D printed carbon fiber and can be tailored to a rider's riding style.
Next week, see you!
Rebecca Bellan.
Not every deal of the week is an acquisition. Rivian received a huge incentives package to build a factory in Georgia. There is a link that will give you access to all the documents.
A quick download for everyone else. Rivian will hire 7,500 people who will earn an average annual salary of $56,000 by the end of the decade, as part of a large carrot that comes with several commitments. Rivian has agreed to maintain these jobs through 2047. Rivian has to make repayments to the state and joint development authority if it is 80% below its maintenance.
Rivian agreed to invest $5 billion into the factory project located near Atlanta.
Tax credits and other subsidies are part of the incentives package. State and local incentives are over a billion dollars. There are $198 million for site and road improvements. An estimated $83 million is being contributed by the state and the joint development authority for the project.
The state is spending almost $30 million to provide a rough-graded 500-acre pad for Rivian. $47 million will be covered by the state and its Department of Transportation for road work that includes road widening, traffic signals and a new interchange.
Other deals got my attention.
Daimler Truck has made a strategic minority investment in the company.
Mountain Crest Acquisition Corp IV, a special purpose acquisition company, and CH-AUTO Technology Corp., a Chinese EV company, agreed to go public in a deal valued at over $1 billion.
RideTandem raised $2.16 million in seed funding to tackle the problem of transport poverty. The company works with taxi, minicab and coach companies to provide shared commuter services in areas with poor public transport.
Shenzhen State Fuel Cell Corporation, a Chinese provider of hydrogen used in fuel cell vehicles, is considering a debut on the stock exchange early next year via a SPAC merger that would give it a $1 billion valuation after listing.
The $3.6 billion all-cash offer was rejected by the airlines. The merger with Frontier Airlines is going to go ahead.
The company raised $200 million in a Series D round. The startup is valued at $900 million.
Keep scrolling, if you want to catch up on earnings. Earnings had its own section this week.
The fleet management system that Aurora Innovation unveiled can be used to improve operations for the startup's products. The system was revealed during the first quarter.
Embark is working with U.S. Xpress, a truckload carrier that is working with a number of other companies to create a process for having an automated truck at a trucking terminal. Embark will help US Xpress identify the best terminals in their national network for autonomously delivery based on volume.
A self-driving technology company in Tampere, Finland, completed a 2.5 month pilot to see how self-driving cars work with public transportation networks and collect feedback from users.
As part of its Route to Zero Emissions strategy, Volta Trucks revealed its product, services and manufacturing plan to bring its electric commercial vehicles into the North American market. The truck will be launched in the U.S. next year.
Arrival said in a securities filing that it has received European Whole Vehicle type approval.
The Biden Administration said it will provide $3.1 billion in funding to support the domestic production of advanced batteries that will spur electric vehicle adoption.
Fisker plans to add a third model to its lineup, a fully electric luxury GT sports car. According to the company, the Project Ronin concept is a long-range, four-passenger grand tourer with plenty of luggage room.
Sila will begin production of its next-gen battery technology in the second half of the century. The full production is expected to start in the early 20th century. Sila has not publicly named the partnerships that will be served by the factory.
The company said it will spend over two billion dollars to increase production of electric vehicles in Canada.
VW Group CEO Herbert Diess wrote a post on LinkedIn that gives a little insight into the company. There was one Nugget that stood out. The opposite is going to be reality, as we want to expand our partnership with Mobileye, are already in talks.
Apple has hired a Ford executive to help with automotive expertise, signaling that its mysterious car project is still alive. Ford's global director of safety engineering, Desi Ujkashevic, will join the software giant's efforts to develop a fully electric car, which has been beset by delays, regulatory issues and executive departures.
Tyler Painter was hired as the CFO of Wisk Aero. Painter was the CFO for Surf Air Mobility. He was the CFO and COO of Solazyme for ten years.
San Francisco, San Jose, Denver, Las Vegas and Atlanta will get shared rides in May. The reduced fare service will be available in other markets throughout the year, as the company abandoned its carpooling service in March 2020.
The earnings season is in full swing. We will be watching Aeye, Canoo, Innoviz, Lordstown, Rivian and Workhorse next week.
There are some mobility companies that reported earnings.
The developer reported an operating loss of $143 million, a slight improvement from the $192 million loss in the same year-ago period. Its net loss was down from last year.
You don't see a term like that everyday. Aurora took in $42 million for development work associated with the company's agreement with Toyota. As a pre-revenue company, Aurora declined to give any guidance, allowing the company to finish its call in about 30 minutes.
We are. The investors didn't like what they saw. The company reported Q1 earnings on May 3.
The company beat revenue expectations but it wasn't enough to quell concerns over a few other metrics, including a decline in per-rider revenue compared to Q4 2021. The contribution result, which is essentially its ride-sharing top line minus revenue costs, with certain items added back, was 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465, which is 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 less than what it recorded in both Q3 and Q4.
Alex Wilhelm dug a little deeper to understand why investors were uneasy. The market seems to be focused on the cost of driver incentives as well as revenue growth in the second half of the year.
The labor problem won't go away. What about the ride-sharing service? The company beat revenue expectations and seems to have a better position in terms of driver supply.
The group is called the Lucid Group.
The EV automaker closed out the quarter with $58.7 million in revenue, which was driven by customer deliveries of over 300 vehicles. The company pulled in more money in the same quarter last year. It's more than the analysts' expectations of $53.19 million, according to Yahoo Finance estimates.
The company had a net loss of $81.3 million in the first quarter, an improvement over the $748 million loss last year.
There was an update on its legal matters. The company has few lawsuits from investors who accuse the company of making false and misleading statements about the expected start of production for the Lucid Air.
The company said that it was raising the prices of the Air sedan from June 1. The base price of the Air sedan was pushed up as much as 13% by the price hikes.
Tu simple.
In March, it was reported that TuSimple was considering selling its China business. The company said that the stock price doesn't reflect the value of the China freight business during the earnings call this week. TuSimple's executives said it would be good to split the Asia-Pacific operations off and look for other pools of capital that would ascribe the proper value to the stock.
It might be true that TuSimple wants to separate itself from its China business due to monetary concerns, but not necessarily for that reason.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States reviewed the investments in TuSimple by Sun Dream Inc. TuSimple entered into a National Security Agreement with the agency after the review concluded in February, which included: adopting a technology control plan, appointing a security officer and security director, and establishing a government security committee to be chaired by the security director.
The company has already incurred substantial costs and expects to continue to incur costs according to the risk factors outlined in TuSimple's 10Q. The company is a bit nervous about the agency's authority.
It's possible that peeling off TuSimple's China operations is a smart financial decision, but it's also possible that it's more about the regulatory headaches the company is facing.
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