There is a significant change in the industry taking place at the moment which harks back to the beginning of the market when companies were investing in each other to try and get a lead in their desired sub-market. Recently Motoring Weekly discussed the investment made by Honda in GM’s Cruise Automation division that followed a similar investment by SoftBank - who have a … [Read more...]
California Gig Firms Challenge Court Ruling
To start this article it is important to define what we mean by a gig firm. The “gig” economy is defined as getting very short term contracts as opposed to longer term contracts or a permanent job. Very short term is defined in minutes or hours as opposed to days. An example of this type of work would be deliveries or ride share driving. Therefore a gig firm is a company such … [Read more...]
Longhauling
Here at Motoring Weekly we have written reports about ride-sharing for a while now and some of the new, or repurposed, terminology that is being used. The latest is “longhauling”. This is the concept of taking a passenger the long way to try and earn more of the fare and the term probably comes from the taxi industry which if so, shows how close the ride-share and taxi … [Read more...]
New York Caps Ride-Share Vehicle Numbers
In a recent article on Motoring Weekly, we wrote about the huge difference between the numbers of ride-share cars and taxi cabs on New York’s streets - only 20% of the total vehicles are cabs. Like other cities across the world, the taxi industry has been battling with the Ubers and Lyfts of the world, mainly because ride-sharing was originally designed as a way to reduce the … [Read more...]
Waymo Buys More Vehicles
Motoring Weekly has written about robo-taxis before and this segment of the public transportation market is appears to be growing. Earlier this year, Waymo, a spin off from Google - but still owned by the parent company, Alphabet, committed to buying 62,000 Chrysler Pacifica mini-vans! However, all was not what it seemed. At the time it made headlines due to the size of the … [Read more...]