[volkman10]

The Volkswagen Group has named its new thirteenth brand Moia. The newly formed company will focus on the emerging market for mobility on demand, which Volkswagen is developing as a second pillar to its business alongside the traditional car sales model.

Moia’s goal is to be among the top three mobility services providers by 2025. Although it is a standalone brand, it will work closely with the other 12 brands in the group, which will continue to develop their own mobility solutions

Moia will begin by offering ride-hailing in the short term before moving into car pooling and shuttle services using its own purpose-built battery electric vehicles that will, in time, most likely be self-driving.

This new special-purpose vehicle, or SPV, will be built by one of Moia’s sister passenger vehicle companies in the group and feature the badges of both firms. It is likely to be unveiled in a early form next year.

Moia aims to provide mobility for everyone at affordable prices without having to own their own car

The first step is ride hailing, and the Volkswagen Group has already laid the groundwork. In May of this year, it made a $300m (£236m) investment in Gett, an on-demand taxi service that operates in more than 100 cities around the world, including 25 in the UK.

The second major area of Moia’s business is to set up its own on-demand pooling shuttle services from homes to city centres that are co-ordinated via an app.

Moia’s first vehicle pooling pilot projects are scheduled to begin in two European cities in late 2017.

It is likely that Moia’s services might have to rely on vehicles powered by international combustion engines in some regions in the short-term

The new company will focus its initial activities in Germany.If that is successful, Hamburg will act as a blueprint for Moia’s activities in other European cities in the future

Source

[GTO]

Reeks of confidence & commitment. Unlike so many other car makers who have bought shares of new-age companies, VW is floating an entirely new division. Will be interesting to see whose strategy works out.

We're going to see more changes in the automotive industry in the coming 10 - 15 years than we have in the last 30 - 40.

No one knows which companies are going to emerge as dominant forces in new-age mobility; the field is wide open & it could swing either ways.

[volkman10]

VW's new Moia brand hires high-profile former Daimler executive. Henrich starts at Moia on Jan. 1st.

Volkswagen Group's new mobility services brand, Moia, has hired Robert Henrich as its chief operating officer. Henrich is one of the leading figures in car-sharing services and was a high profile executive at Daimler until his departure in February.

Henrich founded Daimler's Car2Go unit in 2009 as a pilot project. It was the world’s first non-station-based car-sharing service. Today Car2Go is the world’s largest "free-floating" car-sharing operation with services in 29 cities in Europe, the U.S. and China. It has a fleet of cars over 14,000 vehicles and over 2 million registered customers. Its success prompted other automakers to set up similar operations such as BMW Group’s DriveNow

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[volkman10]

Volkswagen To Launch Fully-Autonomous Ride-Sharing In 2021.

VW intends on launching autonomous fleets in two to five cities in just a few years’ time and will offer the services to the general public through the Moia and Gett mobility brands.



On autonomous Cars:

Volkswagen Group plans to launch a number of fully autonomous Level 5 electric cars, vans and trucks starting as early as 2021. It will begin by testing them at its headquarters in the near future

Sedric self-driving concept, which debuted in Geneva in March and also was shown at the AAI 2017, and it marks just the beginning.

team is already working on ideas for a whole Sedric family of fully autonomous vehicles for the city, for luxurious long-range mobility, through self-driving delivery vans and heavy commercial trucks

Sedric, short for "self-driving car," is VW Group's first concept. The four-person shuttle bears no signs or logos from any of the group's eight passenger-car brands.

Soon it will go into testing by transporting employees in our factory in Wolfsburg, says VW's CEO.

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[volkman10]

Volkswagen’s MOIA debuts its all-electric rideshare vehicle.

The all-electric car, which made its debute at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin today, is designed to provide maximally usable space for up to six passengers, and will make its official debut in service on roads beginning in Hamburg in 2018, where the company expects to put about 200 cars on the road at first.

The concept is centered around ride sharing, with a design tailor-made for users who will seek to pool their vehicle use.
This six-seater vehicle goes above and beyond the typical current electric vehicle, with individual seats in place of bench, and with USB ports and dimmable interior lighting for individual passenger comfort and convenience. There’s built-in onboard Wi-fi, and luggage storage provided not in the rear as you might expect, but up front next to the driver to provide more leg and passenger room in the rear compartment.

Range on the vehicle is around 186 miles based on the global harmonized WLTP testing standards, and it can also recoup up to 80 percent of is charge in just 30 minutes. The entire design and build of the car took only 10 months to get to this point, where a functional concept is present

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