All-Electric Car-Sharing Service Called WE Being Offered by Volkswagen
Next year in Germany, Volkswagen will launch a new car-sharing service, called WE, exclusively utilizing all-electric vehicles. The service will expand to international markets the following year, with presences in major cities across Europe, North America, and Asia.
“Our vehicle-on-demand fleets will consist entirely of electric cars, and will therefore provide zero-emission, sustainable mobility. That is an intelligent way to relieve the strain on urban areas,” said Jürgen Stackmann, Volkswagen’s board member for sales.
Read the article at Digital Trends.
Lyft and Uber Want to Become Full Spectrum Transportation Providers
Uber and Lyft want a role in all of the ways you get from point A to point B, so long as you're doing it on their platform. The future of ride-sharing is moving beyond cars to include electric scooters, bikes, and even public transit.
Lyft has acquired Motivate, the largest bike-share operator in North America. Uber is launching a "new modalities" unit to lead its expansion into bikes, scooters, and more.
Read the article at CNN Money.
Trump’s Trade War Will Hit the Auto Industry Significantly
Chinese officials declared, the U.S. has launched “the biggest trade war in economic history. It will impact a broad spectrum of industrial sectors, everything from entertainment to agriculture, though automotive manufacturers could be particularly hard-hit.
Ford could be one of the manufacturers hardest hit by the trade war. The automaker has been in an extended slump in China, sales tumbling 38% during the first half of the year.
Read the article at The Detroit Bureau.
A Call to Action: Marketing Communications Becomes A Company-wide Opportunity
By Ed Pierce, Fleet Industry Marketer
According to Kevin Joyce, CMO and vice president of strategy services with The Pedowitz Group, there’s a significant gap between management’s expectations of Marketing accountability and its ability to quantify its performance.
While 76% of marketing organizations are accountable for, or share accountability for, P&L, only 19% of marketers have comprehensive tracking and reporting practices in place.
Given the roles of traditional marketing that is not surprising.
Self-Driving Cars May Be Further Away Than the Industry Admits
Over the past ten years, deep learning — a method that uses layered machine-learning algorithms to extract structured information from massive data sets — has driven almost unthinkable progress in AI and the tech industry, causing great optimism from car makers.
However, the dream of a fully autonomous car may be further than we realize. There’s growing concern among AI experts that it may be years, if not decades, before self-driving systems can reliably avoid accidents.
Read the article at The Verge.
