The car manufacturer Volkswagen wants to enter the business with leasing bicycles. The financial subsidiary Volkswagen Financial Services is planning a stake in the Dutch provider Bike Mobility Services (BMS), with whose parent company Pon the Wolfsburg-based company already works with the car rental company Europcar, VW announced on Monday at the IAA mobility fair in Munich.
BMS is represented in bike leasing with brands such as Business Bike, Lease A Bike and B2Bike. “We are systematically driving the transformation forward and consistently opening up other attractive sources of income in the area of sustainable mobility,” said CEO Oliver Blume. The group expects a new, lucrative business area in Europe and the USA from the participation in BMS. The aim is to become the number two bicycle financier in Europe.
Cheaper e-cars should be available from 2025
In contrast to its German competitors BMW and Mercedes – and above all in contrast to its competitors from China – the car manufacturer did not bring any real mass-market innovations to the IAA. Blume has announcements ready for this. The CEO promises in Munich “affordable” e-cars from 2025. Affordable, that means for Blume: at entry-level prices under 25,000 euros. From 2025, the further developed MEB+ platform will also offer ten percent more range and efficiency. Models from Volkswagen, Skoda and Cupra should then be able to charge their batteries in less than 20 minutes, as VW announced. “We’re making good progress. And faster than planned,” says Blume, with a view to the switch to electric cars and mobility services. An essential prerequisite for the “democratization of e-mobility” is falling costs for batteries. A decisive lever for this is the unit cell of the VW subsidiary PowerCo as well as innovations such as inexpensive cell chemistry without cobalt and nickel. “This will make e-mobility affordable and even more sustainable for broader sections of the population,” promised VW.
The switch to electric vehicles in Germany has recently slowed down somewhat, as there are currently hardly any cars with electric motors that a large number of customers can afford. The Wolfsburg-based group also wants to reduce costs through partnerships with other car manufacturers in addition to higher quantities. In addition to Ford, the Indian manufacturer Mahindra also wants to use the electric drive and unit cell of the MEB volume electric platform. Discussions on this are well advanced. It will still be a while before e-cars are just as profitable as comparable combustion models. In the medium term, this will be achieved for most e-models with the new SSP platform, on which more than 40 million vehicles are to be built across all brands and segments.