There is all the new mobility inside Daimler Mobility, a company born less than two years ago and flanked by Mercedes-Benz and Daimler Truck as the third independent company of the Stuttgart group. In addition to cars, trucks and buses, Daimler is thus highlighting the need for an additional pillar, built on the offer of mobility services, to face the market in the coming decades.
Daimler Mobility has at its disposal a veritable galaxy of brands, created or acquired over the last fifteen years with foresight regarding the evolution of customer requests, who now find a common home and strategy. You say car sharing – in fact – and you think of the smart cars of Car2go, the service launched by Daimler in 2008 in Germany and arrived in Italy in 2013 first in Milan, then in Rome and other cities. Today the Daimler Mobility car sharing has the Share Now brand and is managed in joint venture with BMW.
The collaboration with BMW for the offer of new mobility services is not limited to shared cars but, within the Your Now container, also includes Free Now, the app dedicated to taxi services and shared rides that has incorporated the previous MyTaxi and allows you to move in ten countries and over a hundred cities by booking and paying directly from your smartphone. Then there is the Reach Now brand, which has replaced – by expanding the services offered – the previous Moovel and concerns the sharing of scooters and electric bikes, while Charge Now is dedicated to access to the electric vehicle charging network.
In China, the Daimler joint venture dedicated to mobility services is with Geely and with the BlackRides brand, it offers rental services with driver in the megalopolis of Hangzhou, with the aim of going to other large cities in the country. Worldwide, the limousine service is managed by Daimler Mobility with the historic Blacklanes brand, born in Berlin and with offices in Dubai, Singapore and Brisbane with an international presence involving more than 400 employees.
FlixMobili-ty, the company that controls FlixBus and FlixTrain, is also part of the Daimler Mobility galaxy. FlixBus, born in 2013 from the merger of two German start-ups, is currently one of the leading companies in collective mobility in Europe. More than 2,500 bus connections are offered, with destinations in 36 countries, over 400,000 connections a day (in many cases even with departures every 30 minutes) and a number of travelers that since launch has largely exceeded one hundred million.
The rental car brand is Athlon, a company founded over a hundred years ago in a car repair shop in the Netherlands which today manages a fleet of 425,000 vehicles in Europe. Daimler Mobility, under the Athlon brand, plays a crucial role in the large-scale diffusion of the ever-increasing number of electric Mercedes models. Mobility services and innovative electric car rental formulas – including access to charging infrastructures, alternative vehicles in case of travel on itineraries not yet sufficiently electrified, integration with the rental of electric bikes, scooters and car-sharing – in the Daimler vision they represent a decisive key to fully enter the era of zero-emission travel.
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