EC Approves Daimler-BMW Mobility JVs
The European Commission has approved six joint mobility ventures from Daimler and BMW, subject to conditions.
The JVs will entail the automakers pooling their resources in the parking, charging, “free-floating” car-sharing, and ride-hailing markets. The EC said mergers of their services would generate “competition concerns” in Düsseldorf, Munich, Vienna, Hamburg, Cologne, and Berlin. It said “alternatives to car-sharing” would be “limited” in those cities.
When making its decision, the EC considered what “competitive restraints” on the automakers’ merged mobility services alternatives like public transit and “station-based” car-sharing would exercise. It also found many other automakers and car rental companies want to enter the free-floating car share market, and other providers of car-sharing services and mobility service aggregation apps like Daimler’s moovel could find usage of their services decline significantly as the result of these JVs.
To allay the EC’s concerns, BMW and Daimler offered to provide other car-sharing services with access to moovel, and application programming interfaces (APIs) with access to other aggregator apps so those apps’ users could be redirected to the automakers’ own car-sharing services, DriveNow and car2go. The EC said this proposed solution satisfied its concerns about monopolization, and approved the merger of their services, on the condition that the solution is fully implemented.
Separately, Daimler has announced a deal with Bosch to trial an on-demand ride-hailing service with Mercedes-Benz S-Class Level 4 and 5 autonomous vehicles in San Jose, Northern California in the second half of 2019.
