Ford shuts down its Chariot shuttle service – TechCrunch
Ford knocks down Chariot, commute start as it bought just two years ago, which would be part of the automaker's fresh effort to move beyond the traditional business of buying and selling cars.
Wagon will terminate the service on commuter routes in the UK on January 25, according to a business update Thursday. Other shuttle services in New York and San Francisco will cease by February 1. The dynamic shuttle service also had a business activity, which was routes with corporate and transit businesses. These business routes in Austin, Chicago, Denver, Detroit and Seattle are beginning to fluctuate in early March.
Wagon would not give much detail on why the service was closed, except to exclude the failure of rideship numbers.
"In today's mobility landscape, wants and needs change rapidly to customers and cities," the company wrote in a post on their website. The company continued to thank its customers for their support over the past five years.
Reports on weak demand and corporate morale had been tricking out for months. A post in August by Streetsblog noted that Chariot's shuttle buses in New York were emptied most of the time, according to data provided by the company and evaluated by transit analyst Eric Goldwyn. This analysis showed that Chariot's fleet with 25 or more vans served around 1[ads1],000 riders in total, or about nine riders per vehicle per day.
In February, Ali Vahabzadeh, CEO and co-founder of the launch of the carriage was abandoned by the company. In the meantime, he was replaced by Dan Grossman, who heads Microtransit for Ford Smart Mobility, while the company looked for a firm person who heads Chariot.
Carriage has 625 total employees, including drivers; About 385 of them are in the Bay Area. Some wagons will be offered opportunities in Ford Mobility, a company spokesman said.
Vogn launched on Y Combinator, and had only increased about $ 3 million before Ford bought it. Even for $ 65 million in addition to earn-outs. It bases its service around a fleet of transit wagons whose routes are directed at commuters, and where routes are offered based on a crowdsourced voice.
Carriage was part of a number of Ford acquisitions and investments since the automaker announced a broad transport and mobility plan in 2015. This strategy, which has evolved over time, involves increased connectivity (and the services provided with that property) in the cars, develops autonomous driving technology, and uses large data gathered from car sensors to learn more about how people travel and launch Ford Smart Mobility, a private subsidiary with a mission to invest in and develop transportation services, including car sharing and driving.
