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BMW negotiates Daimler alliance, buys out car-service partner Sixt

Sixt sells its stake in DriveNow car-sharing to BMW BMW in talks with Daimler to combine car-sharing Combining car-sharing business to aid robotaxi plans FRANKFURT — Germany's BMW has bought out partner Sixt from their joint venture DriveNow, paving the way for a broader car-sharing and driverless taxi alliance with Daimler to compete against Uber and Lyft. Car rental company Sixt said on Monday it would generate an extraordinary pre-tax profit of about 200 million euros ($248 million) in 2018 from the sale of the DriveNow stake to BMW for 209 million euros. "With DriveNow as a wholly-owned subsidiary, we have all options for continued strategic development of our services," said Peter Schwarzenbauer, BMW's board member for Digital Business Innovation. "Our experience with mobility services supports our development of future autonomous, electrified and connected fleets," he said, adding that BMW aims to have 100 million customers for "premium mobility services" by 2025. The Sixt deal comes as BMW moves closer to a deal to combine its car-sharing services with Daimler's Car2Go, a person familiar with the discussions told Reuters last week. The German carmakers want to build a joint business that includes car sharing, ride-hailing, electric vehicle charging, and digital parking services, a senior executive at one of the companies said on Monday. Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler and BMW declined comment on the status of potential talks on their car-sharing business. "This is speculation, we do not comment," BMW said. The senior executive, who declined to be named because the plan is not public, said: "This will create an ecosystem which can also be used for managing robotaxi (driverless taxi) fleets." BMW would contribute its ParkNow and ChargeNow businesses to the common company, the executive said, adding that there were still differences of opinion over the valuation of Car2Go. The market for ride-hailing services currently makes up around 33 percent of the global taxi market, and could grow eightfold to $285 billion by 2030, once autonomous robotaxis are in operation, Goldman Sachs said in a recent research note. BMW and Daimler are now working on developing autonomous cars, vehicles which could enable them to up-end the market for taxi and ride-hailing services.

Audi investing $30.3 billion through 2018 for product expansion

How does Audi plan to reach two million units in annual sales and pay for the 11 new models it's adding to its lineup - an expansion that may include models named SQ2, Q9 and F-Tron? By increasing its investment to 22 billion euros ($30.3 billion US) between now and 2018. That figure represents an increase of about 500 million euros over the previously planned outlay, according to a report by Automotive News, and that could be due to Audi wishing to goad the momentum that pushed it to 1.5 million annual sales two years ahead of schedule.
It's also about staving off the challenges from BMW and Mercedes-Benz. Now that BMW has been able to turn some of its attention away from its "i" series of Megacity cars, it will reportedly spend more than planned in 2014 as it continues the rollout of ten all-new vehicles and 15 new-generation vehicles through the end of next year. Mercedes, having been dropped to third in the sales race, is preparing to add 13 new cars over the next six years.
Audi's money is going into technology, into product like the next-generation TT and the Q1 and production expansions and upgrades all over the world. The expenditure represents just under a fourth of Volkswagen's 84.2 billion-euro ($115.7 US) outlay devoted to taking the number-one global automaker title away from General Motors and Toyota by 2018.

BMW i8 and M1 reunited in mid-engined Bavarian retrospective

The BMW i8 may be the cutting edge today – it did, after all, just win our Technology of the Year award – but as rare an event as it is, it's not the first time that BMW has put out an extreme mid-engined supercar. The last time was in the late 1970s with the M1, a Giugiaro-designed, (partially) Lamborghini-developed piece of exotic machinery. The better part of four decades later, Auto Express has brought together an original M1 with its spiritual (if much more advanced) successor for the video comparison that was bound to happen. The question we can't help but ponder, initial sales success aside, is whether the i8 will mature into a classic in the same way the M1 has.