Volkswagen is currently expanding its business model at a rapid pace. In April the car service Moia is to start in Hamburg. First with a fleet of one hundred electrically powered, six-seat shared taxis, which can be booked by app. In the second quarter of 2019, the electric car sharing "We share" will start operating in Berlin, with 1500 VW E-Golfs.
The Wolfsburg respond to a global trend: More and more people in urban areas do not necessarily want own a car, but prefer vehicles on call. This often works much like taxi driving - except that today car sharing (rental cars), ride sharing (shared taxis), ride-sharing services or mixed forms of this mobility offer are available. All this is possible mostly with smartphone apps. The services are usually cheaper than the taxi and often more convenient than a private car - just because parking, repairs and refueling omitted.
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Mobility services: Size mattersFor automakers who previously lived on car sales, this could be alarming news. Less sold cars mean less sales and probably less profit. So the corporations themselves are entering the new, growing business.
This will help the auto industry to double its annual sales worldwide by 2030 to 6.6 trillion euros, predicts the consulting firm McKinsey. A quarter of the increase will come from mobility services, electrification and vehicle automation - the rest, however, from the classic business.
For VW and other manufacturers it is high time to occupy the new market. New and formerly non-sector mobility providers are hurried. The Chinese car dealer Didi Chuxing organizes around 7.5 billion trips a year; the US company Uber about 4 billion; at the Fahrdienst Grab, which is active in eight countries in Southeast Asia, there are almost 2.2 billion trips per year.
Car companies against startups and data giants
Toyota registered $ 1 billion at Grab in June 2018 - the largest carmaker ever invested in such a mobility company. In August, the Japanese contributed $ 500 million to Uber. This shows that cooperation is the one option that automakers have to get involved in the mobility industry. Own initiatives are the other.
"One can speak of a battle of the worlds," says Stefan Bratzel, automotive expert and professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Bergisch Gladbach. "On the one hand, the automakers compete with each other for the most successful mobility offer, and second, the auto industry is in competition with the big data and mobility companies." Also, the US Internet giant alphabet (Google) is with the driving service Waymo in the business.
The manufacturers of "transport vessels", as Bratzel says, will be responsible for a rather small part of the added value in the future. More profitable are the four other links in the mobility value chain: software for increasingly automated moving vehicles; the operation of the transport fleets and online services for the users. If the ride is cheap and the passenger saves money, he may shop in the car at Amazon, book a restaurant or use a paid game app.
Business model based on huge numbers of users
Experts see the greatest profit opportunities in the operation of the app, through which customers book the travel service. It offers many other marketing opportunities.
"So far, the success in the number of cars sold has been measured," says Marcus Wiland of management consulting MHP. "In the future, especially in urban areas, passenger kilometers will be sold - that's the cake that's at stake."
Size will play a crucial role. The mobility platform Didi Chuxing currently has about 500 million users registered. In the digital world, the equation holds: many users leave a lot of data, and many data provide a wealth of knowledge about users' preferences and preferences - resulting in new, better offers that appeal to even more people.
Merger of Car2Go and DriveNow as a first step
"Digital systems are critical-mass systems," says Jens Monsees, vice president of digital strategy at BMW. "We therefore aim to reach more than 100 million users of our central BMW app by 2025." To quickly unite many customers under one roof, BMW and Daimler are merging their existing mobility offerings - car sharing, ride-sharing, taxi apps, parking space reservation or charging station search.
The antitrust authorities gave the green light. Now it is about "to offer a holistic ecosystem of mobility services that is available at the touch of a finger", as it is called at BMW. A Daimler spokesman explains that they want to "create a relevant tech player who can act at eye level with the well-known technology companies and digital competitors." The combination of the carsharing companies Car2go (Daimler) and DriveNow (BMW) alone results in a cooperation with more than 4 million users and around 20,000 vehicles in 30 cities worldwide so far.
When taxis drive autonomously, it gets really interesting
Car sharing, however, is likely to be a small part of the future mobility business. The greatest expectations are focused on the driving services. This is related to another trend: autonomous driving. As soon as the vision of the driverless shuttle truck becomes reality, which is brought about by swiping on the smartphone, the profits of such services are expected to increase sharply.
Because then the biggest cost factor would fall off - the driver. For example, staff costs amount to 60 to 70 percent. If you are big enough and have established yourself with the customers, you do not have to pass the savings on to cheaper prices immediately, the companies hope.
"As soon as autonomous driving on the market comes to a certain extent, this will jumble the mobility offerings market," says Bratzel. But when will that be? So far, there are only indicia.
For example, the Google sister company Waymo has announced that it will open its own factory in the US state of Michigan in 2021, in which series cars from Fiat-Chrysler (minivan Pacifica) and Jaguar (electric SUV I-Pace) are to be converted into Waymo self-propelled shuttle vehicles , We are talking about tens of thousands of cars - in the first step.