News
19/07/2018
Uber bets on shared bikes and electric skates
Uber bets on shared bikes and electric skates
The American firm and its competitor Lyft want to expand the offer of their 'apps' to become mobility companies in capital letters
It is going to be that the revolution of the urban mobility that the apologists of the smart cities promise to us goes in serious. This is what at least Uber and his great competitor Lyft believe. The business giant founded by Travis Kalanick bought the electric bike startup Jump in April for around 200 million dollars. Lyft, unknown in Europe but operating in some 300 cities in the US and Canada, picked up the gauntlet and was made earlier this month for 250 million with Motivate, the largest shared bike company in North America.
They are not the only movements of these two big companies in green mobility. The first has just entered a round of funding of 335 million dollars opened by Lime, a startup of shared electric skates. These devices, the latest fashion in San Francisco, promise to gradually conquer the center of the cities as they are doing the bikes without mooring (dockless) of Ofo or Mobike.
Lyft is also in full paperwork to obtain permits to operate in the Californian city with these small electric vehicles, which succeed in the so-called last mile journeys (the final leg of the trips). The only firm capable of maintaining the pulse of Kalanick is also reaching agreements with several US cities to integrate the public transport offer into its app.
The ideologues of smart mobility, one of the great bets of smart cities, argue that one day the typical route in the big cities could be something like this: drive to the station, take the metro or train and, At the exit, a bicycle to get to the office. This scheme is already possible thanks to the municipal bicycle services and, more recently, to the shared Asian bicycles. Shared mobility companies have long pressured the municipalities of large cities to find their services fit into this formula. They can help, they say, to achieve the goal of reducing urban traffic.
Uber is no longer satisfied with being a car service with driver: now it wants to be a mobility company in the broad sense. It even offers in some US cities the option of renting the car to private individuals. Its objective, like that of Lyft, is to agglutinate in a single apptoda the relevant transport offer. Why not make part of the journey by car and, when approaching the center, continue on an electric scooter? Why not go by bike on those trips that are more comfortable? Gathering all that offer in the same application can make consumers end up associating mobility as a whole with a single brand.
• Non-original ideas
It is worth remembering that Uber started as a luxury transport service. The vision of Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp was something like democratizing the limousines. The great leap forward of the company occurred when they decided to include much cheaper options in the application. And, more importantly, they radically changed their model: they passed ownership of the fleet driven by the drivers to make the latter put their own car (UberX, which in Spain was launched as Uber Pop). That triggered the supply of available vehicles and at the same time made the service more effective for the users.
The master formula that would give them such success was not an original idea of Kalanick: they copied it from Lyft, its great competitor in the USA. As Brad Stone recalls in his book Lo que viene (Deusto, 2017), dedicated to the origins of Uber and Airbnb, the two biggest giants of the platform economy did not even invent the businesses in which they triumphed. If there were already ubers before Uber and airbnbs before Airbnb, how did they manage to beat their competitors? Stone's thesis is that, while both were born in San Francisco, they had a lot of access to the technology community and venture capital. "Exposing your ideas to the right people can allow you to raise a lot of money, and when it comes to growing fast and expanding around the world to have the advantage of being the first to arrive, access to capital can make a difference," he explains. this journalist from Bloomberg News.
In the case of Uber, it turns out that the founders were already experienced entrepreneurs. They had started businesses before, so they knew what had to be done. And they did not drop the rings when it was necessary to decide to give a return to the business with UberX, something that usually costs many first time entrepreneurs.
• Asian inspiration
Neither have they been original now when betting to become a mobility app in capital letters. This time they have not been copied from Lyft, but from Didi Chuxing, the local equivalent of Uber in China, the great dominator of the market in the Asian giant. The company manages millions of journeys every day in cars with driver, shared or rental cars, buses, minibuses and bicycles.
That is the model towards which Uber and Lyft seem to advance: all the options available to an app. An idea inspired by a Chinese company.
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