Welcome again to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for information and insights on the way forward for transportation.
Before I soar into the all of the information — and boy there was quite a bit! — I’ve an vital replace for all of you beautiful readers. TechCrunch Mobility is shifting to Thursdays! It would be the similar e-newsletter full of information and insights on the sector, however simply touchdown in your inboxes Thursday morning. Sign up right here without cost — simply click on TechCrunch Mobility!
EV startup Fisker laid off extra workers to “preserve cash” as chapter inches ever nearer; ride-hailing firm Ola lower about 180 jobs and ousted its chief govt, Hemant Bakshi, merely 4 months after appointing him to the put up; and lidar firm Luminar slashed its 700-person workforce by 20% as a part of a restructuring to undertake an “asset light” enterprise mannequin.
Oh, after which there was Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who axed the automaker’s international Supercharger community workforce. That perplexing choice comes simply as non-Tesla EV drivers achieve entry to the community.
That’s to not say your entire transportation sector was surrounded by financial storm clouds. There have been brighter moments as nicely. Let’s go test it out!
A bit fowl
In the fallout from Tesla’s nice Supercharger culling, we’ve spoken to a number of little birds, together with those that have been laid off and folk working at different automakers. As I discussed above, Elon Musk gutted Tesla’s international Supercharger group of about 500 individuals. Insiders at a number of completely different automakers — all of that are adopting Tesla’s charging tech — stated they didn’t see this coming. “Shocked” and “stunned” have been the commonest phrases I heard.
On the worker entrance, there was an absence of communication from human assets within the hours immediately following the mass layoff. Some instructed me they and their fellow former co-workers had not acquired details about severance and that communication had stopped altogether. A couple of of these of us had acquired severance emails by Friday. All of the individuals I communicated with have been nonetheless struggling to know why Musk would lower the Supercharger workforce — a corporation that’s elementary to Tesla and its EV gross sales. Others surmised solely Elon and possibly the previous head of the Supercharger workforce, Rebecca Tinucci, would ever know the reply.
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Deals!
It’s been a minute since we heard of an autonomous automobile startup elevating a considerable amount of cash — or heck any cash in any respect. That all modified this week when Motional scored an important multi-million-dollar win, courtesy of Hyundai.
Hyundai’s complete dedication is $1 billion, however there are vital particulars. Here’s the way it breaks down. Hyundai invested $475 million immediately into Motional as a part of a broader deal that features shopping for out three way partnership associate Aptiv. Hyundai is spending one other $448 million to purchase 11% of Aptiv’s widespread fairness curiosity in Motional.
The fast backstory: Motional was fashioned in 2019 as a $four billion three way partnership between Hyundai and Aptiv. Motional has spent the previous a number of years plugging away at its autonomous automobile tech, working towards a objective of launching a robotaxi service utilizing driverless Hyundai Ioniq 5 automobiles in 2024. As Motional and Hyundai obtained nearer — the businesses introduced plans in November to co-develop production-ready variations of the all-electric Ioniq 5 robotaxi — it appears Aptiv started to know its personal monetary limitations. By January, Aptiv chairman and CEO Kevin Clark flagged that the corporate would scale back its possession curiosity in Motional and cease allocating capital to the enterprise as a result of excessive value of commercializing a robotaxi…
