Transportation

CES 2024 or bust, Superpedestrian e-scooters hit the auction block and Fisker struggles to meet sales goals

Comment

CES 2024
Image Credits: Getty Images

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free.

Hey-o! Howdy readers and welcome back to The Station, your weekly newsletter on all things transportation. I hope you enjoyed the New Year! I appreciated a bit of rest and recovery, just in time for CES 2024.

Yup, I’m in Las Vegas, yet again, for the annual tech trade show. The Big Three U.S. automakers (Ford, GM and Stellantis) won’t have big splashy displays and announcements as in past years. However, there will be plenty of automotive, and more broadly, transportation companies and startups in attendance. I will be on the hunt all week for intriguing and innovative tech. Wish me luck. ;D

Honda, Kia and VinFast are showing off EVs, Hyundai’s Supernal will reveal an electric vertical take-off and landing vehicle and Mercedes will be focusing on software and the in-cabin experience. AI is a theme that is popping up everywhere and perhaps surprising to some, hydrogen fuel will also have a presence.

Stay tuned for our coverage this week.

Want to reach out with a tip, comment or complaint? Email Kirsten at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com. Reminder that you can drop us a note at tips@techcrunch.comIf you prefer to remain anonymousclick here to contact us, which includes SecureDrop (instructions here) and various encrypted messaging apps.

Deal of the week

money the station

It’s been a bit quiet the past few weeks, but there have been some deals worth sharing.

One of note is Gbike, a Seoul-based shared e-scooters and e-bikes operator that is gearing up to go public on the Korean stock market and is reviewing acquisition targets. Founder and CEO Walter Yoon told TechCrunch that the company is in talks for acquisitions in the micromobility industry to increase its market share before its planned initial public offering, aiming for early 2025.

“Details have not been materialized yet, but we’re currently looking at around three to five targets to acquire,” Yoon said, adding that it has not decided how many acquisitions it will complete.

Other deals that got my attention …

Bumper, an auto repair financing startup based in London, raised $18 million in a round led by AutoTech Ventures. Shell Ventures, InMotion Ventures, Porsche Ventures and Revo Capital also participated. Bumper also secured $30 million in debt.

Revfin, an Indian fintech startup that offers auto loans for electric two-wheelers and three-wheelers, raised $14 million in a Series B round led by Omidyar Network, the philanthropic investment firm from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

Salt Creek Capital acquired Vantage Vehicle International, a California-based maker of low-speed utility vehicles.

Swap Energy, an Indonesian EV battery startup, raised $22 million in a Series A round led by Qiming Venture Partners. GGV Capital and existing investor Ondine Capital also participated.

Notable reads and other tidbits

ADAS

Contributor Tim Stevens tested the advanced driver assistance systems in Tesla, BMW, Ford, GM and Mercedes. Here’s how they stacked up.

Autonomous vehicles

Aurora and Continental passed the first major hurdle in a $300 million project to produce thousands of autonomous hardware kits for self-driving trucks.

China’s robotaxi industry is facing new headwinds — and a bit of wariness after watching the drama at Cruise unfold. TC reporter Rita Liao does a deep dive on how these startups are coping.

Nuro struck a deal with safety-focused software company Foretellix to help with virtual testing of its automated driving system, in a bid to cut R&D costs.

Electric vehicles, charging & batteries

2024 will be a crucial year for India, as the country faces challenges to offer accessible growth capital to late-stage startups while trying to lure Tesla and other foreign EV manufacturers to enter its domestic market. Here’s how the country will navigate EVs in 2024.

Fisker is struggling to meet internal sales goals, documents show.

Rivian delivered 10% fewer EVs in the fourth quarter, compared to the third quarter, leaving investors worried about softening demand. Rivian did exceed its production goals for 2023, providing some positive news for the EV maker.

Superpedestrian’s electric scooters — more than 20,000 of them — will be auctioned off later this month, along with other equipment from the startup’s U.S. operations, after closing its doors December 31. Also, don’t miss this article from TechCrunch about what Superpedestrian’s demise means for the e-scooter industry.

Tesla shipped a record number of electric vehicles in Q4 to help it edge out its targets for the year, thanks in part to the popularity of its cheapest vehicle.

The U.S. government revealed the list of EVs that qualify for the full federal tax credit under the newer, more stringent guidelines. Here’s the qualifying EVs list and more details on what drove the change.

VinFast has earmarked an investment of up to $2 billion to build a factory in India.

Cities

TC reporter Rebecca Bellan turned her attention to the overlooked tech that kept cities moving in 2023.

Uber has quietly been testing a flexible pricing service in more than a dozen cities in India.

More TechCrunch

Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review. This week had two major events from OpenAI and Google. OpenAI’s spring update event saw the reveal of its new model, GPT-4o, which…

OpenAI and Google lay out their competing AI visions

Expedia says Rathi Murthy and Sreenivas Rachamadugu, respectively its CTO and senior vice president of core services product & engineering, are no longer employed at the travel booking company. In…

Expedia says two execs dismissed after ‘violation of company policy’

When Jeffrey Wang posted to X asking if anyone wanted to go in on an order of fancy-but-affordable office nap pods, he didn’t expect the post to go viral.

With AI startups booming, nap pods and Silicon Valley hustle culture are back

OpenAI’s Superalignment team, responsible for developing ways to govern and steer “superintelligent” AI systems, was promised 20% of the company’s compute resources, according to a person from that team. But…

OpenAI created a team to control ‘superintelligent’ AI — then let it wither, source says

A new crop of early-stage startups — along with some recent VC investments — illustrates a niche emerging in the autonomous vehicle technology sector. Unlike the companies bringing robotaxis to…

VCs and the military are fueling self-driving startups that don’t need roads

When the founders of Sagetap, Sahil Khanna and Kevin Hughes, started working at early-stage enterprise software startups, they were surprised to find that the companies they worked at were trying…

Deal Dive: Sagetap looks to bring enterprise software sales into the 21st century

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world…

This Week in AI: OpenAI moves away from safety

After Apple loosened its App Store guidelines to permit game emulators, the retro game emulator Delta — an app 10 years in the making — hit the top of the…

Adobe comes after indie game emulator Delta for copying its logo

Meta is once again taking on its competitors by developing a feature that borrows concepts from others — in this case, BeReal and Snapchat. The company is developing a feature…

Meta’s latest experiment borrows from BeReal’s and Snapchat’s core ideas

Welcome to Startups Weekly! We’ve been drowning in AI news this week, with Google’s I/O setting the pace. And Elon Musk rages against the machine.

Startups Weekly: It’s the dawning of the age of AI — plus,  Musk is raging against the machine

IndieBio’s Bay Area incubator is about to debut its 15th cohort of biotech startups. We took special note of a few, which were making some major, bordering on ludicrous, claims…

IndieBio’s SF incubator lineup is making some wild biotech promises

YouTube TV has announced that its multiview feature for watching four streams at once is now available on Android phones and tablets. The Android launch comes two months after YouTube…

YouTube TV’s ‘multiview’ feature is now available on Android phones and tablets

Featured Article

Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

CSC ServiceWorks provides laundry machines to thousands of residential homes and universities, but the company ignored requests to fix a security bug.

2 days ago
Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is just around the corner, and the buzz is palpable. But what if we told you there’s a chance for you to not just attend, but also…

Harness the TechCrunch Effect: Host a Side Event at Disrupt 2024

Decks are all about telling a compelling story and Goodcarbon does a good job on that front. But there’s important information missing too.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Goodcarbon’s $5.5M seed deck

Slack is making it difficult for its customers if they want the company to stop using its data for model training.

Slack under attack over sneaky AI training policy

A Texas-based company that provides health insurance and benefit plans disclosed a data breach affecting almost 2.5 million people, some of whom had their Social Security number stolen. WebTPA said…

Healthcare company WebTPA discloses breach affecting 2.5 million people

Featured Article

Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Microsoft won’t be facing antitrust scrutiny in the U.K. over its recent investment into French AI startup Mistral AI.

2 days ago
Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Ember has partnered with HSBC in the U.K. so that the bank’s business customers can access Ember’s services from their online accounts.

Embedded finance is still trendy as accounting automation startup Ember partners with HSBC UK

Kudos uses AI to figure out consumer spending habits so it can then provide more personalized financial advice, like maximizing rewards and utilizing credit effectively.

Kudos lands $10M for an AI smart wallet that picks the best credit card for purchases

The EU’s warning comes after Microsoft failed to respond to a legally binding request for information that focused on its generative AI tools.

EU warns Microsoft it could be fined billions over missing GenAI risk info

The prospects for troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have gone from bad to worse this week after a United States Trustee filed an emergency motion on Wednesday.  The trustee is asking…

A US Trustee wants troubled fintech Synapse to be liquidated via Chapter 7 bankruptcy, cites ‘gross mismanagement’

U.K.-based Seraphim Space is spinning up its 13th accelerator program, with nine participating companies working on a range of tech from propulsion to in-space manufacturing and space situational awareness. The…

Seraphim’s latest space accelerator welcomes nine companies

OpenAI has reached a deal with Reddit to use the social news site’s data for training AI models. In a blog post on OpenAI’s press relations site, the company said…

OpenAI inks deal to train AI on Reddit data

X users will now be able to discover posts from new Communities that are trending directly from an Explore tab within the section.

X pushes more users to Communities

For Mark Zuckerberg’s 40th birthday, his wife got him a photoshoot. Zuckerberg gives the camera a sly smile as he sits amid a carefully crafted re-creation of his childhood bedroom.…

Mark Zuckerberg’s makeover: Midlife crisis or carefully crafted rebrand?

Strava announced a slew of features, including AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, a new ‘family’ subscription plan, dark mode and more.

Strava taps AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, unveils ‘family’ plan, dark mode and more

We all fall down sometimes. Astronauts are no exception. You need to be in peak physical condition for space travel, but bulky space suits and lower gravity levels can be…

Astronauts fall over. Robotic limbs can help them back up.

Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build,…

Microsoft’s custom Cobalt chips will come to Azure next week

What a wild week for transportation news! It was a smorgasbord of news that seemed to touch every sector and theme in transportation.

Tesla keeps cutting jobs and the feds probe Waymo