BMW and Daimler under talks of combining car-sharing services

BMW and Daimler under talks of combining car-sharing services Car2Go and DriveNow in the hopes of providing a bigger and better service to their customers. This news was shared by a senior executive at one of the Germnan automakers in an interview with Reuters.The merger talks are independently run and are said to be already in the final stages. BMW’s ParkNow parking app is one of the assets being pooled.

This merger, if successful, would allow this new company to compete with ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft, which is such a bug win for the consumers.

Daimler’s Car2Go, which launched in 2008, operates around 14,000 cars in 26 cities in North America, western Europe and China. DriveNow is a joint venture between BMW and car rental firm Sixt founded in 2011, which operates more than 6,000 vehicles in nine major European cities. Car2Go’s customer numbers rose 30 percent in 2017 to almost 3 million, including 870,000 in Germany, while DriveNow’s rose by a quarter to 1 million users, including 720,000 in Germany.

Report from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung saud that both brands would keep their names and only their technology would be merged. However, there wa sno resources cited for this claim.

Stay tuned for more information on this merger!