Zag Daily

London’s rental e-scooter trial has moved into its third phase with Voi and Lime to continue operating the service for the next two years. The UK capital’s shared e-scooter scheme launched in 2021. Its first phase ran until September 2023, its second until August 2026 and its third now underway until May 2028 – the current expiry date of the UK’s national rental e-scooter trials.

Nairobi-based Spiro has secured $18 million in new debt to scale its e-motorcycle fleet and battery swapping network across Uganda and Rwanda. Operating in seven African nations, Spiro sells and leases electric two-wheelers to delivery riders, fleet operators and logistics companies. Under a battery subscription model, riders can swap depleted batteries for fully charged ones at Spiro’s swap stations.

Mercedes-Benz is to integrate Wayve’s automated driving technology into future models within the next two years. A definitive production agreement announced today will see the German automaker fit the Wayve AI Driver into its upcoming vehicles to enable what the companies call “advanced urban and highway point-to-point driving assistance”. The deal comes after Mercedes participated in Wayve’s $1.2 billion Series D funding round earlier this year alongside global automakers Nissan and Stellantis.

The UK government is investing £104 million into active travel across England. Announced today by Secretary of State for Transport Heidi Alexander, the funding will go towards developing the National Cycle Network which links more than 12,000 miles of signed walking, wheeling and cycling routes across the UK. The sum will be distributed to the Walk Wheel Cycle Trust, formerly known as Sustrans, as the charity responsible for developing the network.

Author: Alejandro Martín Barraza, Bid Manager and Urban Planner at Inurba Mobility People who travel across a metropolitan area are people travelling to work, university, railway stations or wherever it is they need to go. They are not people thinking about municipal boundaries. Yet, when someone takes a shared bike in Europe, they’re often required to switch bikes and systems entirely because of invisible borders where the system ends.

Images: Nuro Nuro is betting that the autonomous vehicle industry will ultimately resemble the smartphone market, with a small number of technology companies supplying the underlying software and hardware that powers the majority of carmakers and mobility companies. The California-based company initially set out to build and operate its own autonomous delivery vehicles.

Image: Waymo Alphabet-owned Waymo plans to launch a commercial robotaxi service in Singapore in 2028 as it expands its autonomous ride-hailing operations beyond the US. An initial fleet of all-electric Jaguar I-PACE vehicles will arrive in Singapore in the coming months. A readiness phase will follow in 2027, when trained autonomous specialists will manually drive the vehicles to adapt Waymo Driver to local roads, traffic conditions and monsoon weather.

Image credit: Lucid Motors European shared mobility platform Bolt has agreed to deploy at least 25,000 autonomous vehicles across Europe with US electric carmaker Lucid as it accelerates its push into driverless transport. The companies will co-develop a vehicle platform designed for Level 4 autonomy, which allows a vehicle to drive without human intervention within defined operating conditions.

Image: CityQ Norwegian cargo bike maker CityQ has become the first European four-wheel cargo bike manufacturer to have a vehicle certified against EN 17860, a new European safety standard covering cargo bikes. The certification covers CityQ’s cargo bike, Pickup and Passenger models and follows testing by certification company ACT-LAB. According to CityQ, ACT-LAB reported that the European four-wheel cargo bike is the first to receive the standard.

As the summer winds down across much of the world, masses of shared micromobility executives descended onto the Chinese city of Changzhou this week where the air is still humid and the sun full blown. A city of more than five million, Changzhou and the wider Jiangsu Province has become a beacon of manufacturing in China, renowned for its R&D in new energy, automotive, industrial equipment and AI innovation.