The Station: VW resurrects Scout as an EV brand and mobility SPACs have a helluva week
The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox. Howdy readers! Welcome to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. Believe […]
The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox.
Howdy readers! Welcome to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B.
Believe it or not, it’s been a year since we launched our Q&A series featuring founders of transportation startups. And as promised, we are checking in with these founders on their one-year interview anniversary date comes up.
First up on our check-in list is Frank Reig with Revel.
TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 is just a few days away and I do hope some of my Station readers are there to hear from founders from Aurora, Luminar, Nuro, Veo and Zoox, early-stage investors from Elemental, Muirwoods Ventures and PearVC, strategic and institutional investors from Capital International Investors, GM Ventures, Intel Capital and Snowbull Capital and top engineers, designers and executives from Arrival, Cruise, Motional, Nvidia, Stellantis, VW Group and Waymo. Oh, and of course watch the pitch off, network with other builders and investors and maybe even mix it up with some TechCrunch reporters and editors. A bunch of us will be there.
If you can’t attend and still want the inside scoop, buy the online pass. For $45, you get analyst commentary alongside all recorded videos from the entire event starting May 20 for one week. You also get access to the online sponsor expo network with other attendees online.
“Mobility month,” which I officially declared last week, continued with a TechCrunch Live event with Waabi founder and CEO Raquel Urtasun and Khosla Ventures partner Sven Strohband who joined us to talk about about raising monster rounds. Click the link to watch the session.
The next mobility-themed TechCrunch Live event will be held May 25 at noon PDT. The session, focused on mobility marketplaces, will feature Mike Ghaffary, general partner at Canvas Ventures and Walker Drewett, founder of on-demand vehicle brake repair services startup NuBrakes.
Register here and tune in to hear how Drewett raised capital and built NuBrakes on the learnings from his previous startup, NuWash (it’s on-demand car washes, of course). Don’t forget, we pick three startup founders attending the live event to give their pitch and get feedback from our two guests.
As always, you can email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, opinions or tips. You also can send a direct message to Kirsten at Twitter — @kirstenkorosec.
Micromobbin’
It was a decent week for micromobility news, so let’s jump right in:
Amazon is hiring a micromobility fleet manager to help decarbonize last mile deliveries. Also, meet the skier delivering for Amazon in a remote Austrian village.
Bird and Lime are using Google’s ARCore Geospatial API to power their smartphone camera-based scooter/bike parking solution.
Gogoro is launching its Smartscooters and battery-swapping technology in Tel Aviv this summer, with plans to expand into other Israeli cities.
Specialized has launched a sub-brand called Globe dedicated to building affordable, high-quality electric utility bikes that are designed to replace car trips.
Unagi is launching “Unagi On-Demand,” the scooter manufacturer’s own, more exclusive, version of shared micromobility.
Voi is expanding in Birmingham to more than 80 square kilometers of the city, doubling the size of its operations and allowing riders to travel across the city.
