Daimler and BMW join forces to tackle shared mobility, providing a blueprint for others to follow

May 06, 2019 | Case Study

Automakers spent the past century focused on the same goals: sell more cars and spend less money making them. However, the emergence of shared mobility business models has upended how some consumers think about mobility, with an increasingly large number viewing mobility as a service you can consume rather than a product (like a car) that you buy. This shift poses a threat to automakers, as new vehicle sales would drop in this scenario. This pressure on the business model of automakers comes at a time when R&D budgets are at an all-time high due to expensive, but necessary, autonomous and electric vehicle research, leaving little budget to pursue these new business models. Most automakers have explored the space through investments or acquisitions, but the billions of active users and annual marketing budgets in the billions of dollars mean few automakers have the scale to compete.