Vietnamese EV startup VinFast is trying to get into the electric pickup truck game, as it revealed a new concept called the VF Wild at CES 2024 in Las Vegas. The company announced it also plans to start selling its smallest EV, the VF3, outside of Vietnam, as previously hinted.
It’s hard to say much more about what VinFast has planned for both vehicles, though. The truck will have mid-size pickup dimensions, and a folding mid-gate to allow the five-foot bed to turn into something functionally closer to an eight-foot bed (when the rear seats are down). But the company didn’t share its ambitions for range or pricing, or even when (or if) it plans to mass-produce the thing. It’s a CES concept car in the truest sense — down to the fact that the company did not even have official images of it ready at the time of its launch Tuesday.
The VF3 is a plucky little EV that VinFast announced in Vietnam earlier this year. It’s a two-door city car with limited range and an affordable price tag (think sub-$20,000). It has yet to ship in VinFast’s home country, but the company now says it will sell the car globally. It did not say which countries will be first, or share any other info about what a global launch would look like.
Developing a truck and globally launching a compact EV aren’t even the biggest things on VinFast’s plate. The company is also trying to build factories in North Carolina, Indonesia and India, and has multiple other models in the works.
If this all sounds a little haphazard, then it’s pretty in-character for VinFast. The young company — which is backed by Vietnam’s richest man, Pham Nhat Vuong — has been a little all over the place since its founding in 2017.
VinFast originally built combustion-engine vehicles but quickly pivoted to EVs, starting with the VF8 SUV, which it rather quickly tried bringing to the United States. That rollout has not gone well, as the VF8 was met with very poor reviews. VinFast has struggled to sell the SUV at scale in the U.S. The company recently pivoted to working with dealers to boost sales here.
Globally, the overwhelming majority of VinFast’s EV sales have been to a taxi company owned by Vuong. Oh, and he recently took over as VinFast’s CEO, the latest in a series of shakeups across its many different divisions.
This post has been updated with photos of the VF Wild from the CES show floor.
Supernal, the advanced air mobility company under Hyundai Motor Group, took the wraps off its latest iteration of an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft called the S-A2 that executives say is designed to shuttle passengers by 2028.
The S-A2 is essentially a more fully baked version of what it intends to launch commercially and confirms that, at least for now, Hyundai is still intent on getting into the yet-to-exist electric air taxi business.
That timeline, which was announced Tuesday during CES 2024, has come down to earth in the three years since it revealed its vision concept, also known as S-A1. At that time, Hyundai announced a partnership with Uber Elevate — a company that was gobbled up by Joby Aviation — to develop and potentially mass-produce air taxis for a future aerial rideshare network. Uber Elevate said it would start flight demos in 2020 and offer commercial rides in 2023.
With the eVTOL industry still lacking a single commercial operator, Hyundai’s Supernal came back to CES 2024 with more grounded plans.
Image Credits: Kirsten Korosec
And it’s certainly throwing resources at the project to get there — although Hyundai has never disclosed its exact investment. Supernal has grown to a 600-person team and is also using technical and business capabilities of Hyundai Motor Group and aviation suppliers around the world as it works toward a commercial launch, according to Jaiwon Shin, Hyundai Motor Group president and CEO of Supernal.
There is still quite a bit of work to be done before that can happen, Supernal CTO Ben Diachun noted on the sidelines of the event.
The S-A2 will have to go through a lengthy Type 1 certification process with the Federal Aviation Administration before it can fly commercially. The company will begin testing this year in California its so-called technology demonstrator vehicles, Diachun said. Supernal will also submit this year its application to the FAA. In 2025, Supernal will submit to the FAA its proposal for means of compliance, he added.
The nuts and bolts
The aircraft shown Tuesday is a V-tail with a distributed electric propulsion architecture and eight all-tilting rotors. The S-A2 is loaded with the kind of redundant components like the powertrain, flight controls and avionics — all of the safety critical systems required for commercial aviation.
The aircraft is designed to cruise 120 miles-per-hour at a 1,500-foot altitude. This is meant to be for suburban into inner city travel, with trips falling between 25 and 40 miles, initially.
Diachun said onstage that the aircraft would operate at about 65 decibels as it takes off and lands and 45 decibels while cruising, about the same as a dishwasher, he claimed.
The company’s designers and engineers also made the interior modular, including the ability to replace the battery as technology improves.
General Motors is recalling around 66 electric delivery vans made by its BrightDrop subsidiary after the front drive units in at least two of them caught fire late last year.
The automaker says it’s still investigating the root cause of the fires, but believes a manufacturing defect may have caused the drive pinion to pierce the drive unit casing, creating an oil leak that could catch fire during heavy use. GM says in paperwork filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) that it believes the defect was limited to its larger EV600 vehicles built between November 24, 2021 and May 24, 2022.
Companies including FedEx and Walmart have taken delivery of the EV600. The recall doesn’t affect BrightDrop’s smaller EV400 vans. GM shipped 497 BrightDrop vans in total in 2023.
The recall comes just a few months after GM re-absorbed BrightDrop in an attempt to streamline its electric commercial vehicle efforts. BrightDrop initially launched in 2021 when GM spun it out of its Global Innovation organization.
“The safety of our products is the highest priority for the entire GM team, and we’re working to quickly remedy this matter for our customers,” the company said in a statement to TechCrunch.
GM received a report of a fire in the front drive unit of a BrightDrop EV600 on December 7, and another one on December 13, according to the paperwork filed with NHTSA. The company opened an investigation into the fires on December 22 and decided to conduct a recall on January 4. Both affected vehicles were owned by an undisclosed GM fleet customer.
This is the third recall for BrightDrop vehicles. The EV600 was previously recalled in late 2022 after the company discovered a problem with the water seal on the van’s high-voltage battery pack. It faced another recall in October when GM discovered an issue with one of the van’s airbags.
River, an Indian startup manufacturing electric two-wheelers, has raised $40 million in a funding round led by Japan’s Yamaha Motor as the nearly three-year-old startup looks to increase R&D spending and expand the market presence of its first electric “SUV” two-wheeler in India.
The all-equity Series B round also saw participation from the startup’s existing investors, including Al-Futtaim Automotive, Lowercarbon Capital, Toyota Ventures, Trucks VC and Maniv Mobility. With the latest funding, the startup has cumulatively raised $68 million in four rounds, including the last round of $15 million announced in June.
Since its founding in March 2021, River has focused on developing and producing electric two-wheelers for Indian customers, a burgeoning and rapidly evolving market in a country keen to replace diesel and gas-powered vehicles with EVs. The biggest market opportunity in the South Asian nation — and the one with the most competition — is the two-wheeler market. Nearly 50% of the total EVs sold in the country are two-wheelers with more than 1.7 million on the roads today, according to government data.
The startup believes it can stand out and carve out market share with Indie, a $1,700 two-wheeled scooter that is larger than its competitors. Indie, which River describes as the “SUV of scooters,” has a 14-inch wheelbase and storage space large enough to hold two helmets and cargo weighing up to 33 pounds. Electric two-wheelers from the startup’s rivals — including those from SoftBank-led Ola Electric and Tiger Global–backed Ather Energy — have a 12-inch wheel size and storage for a single helmet.
This utility-lifestyle-focused product was born out of months in R&D at a dedicated facility in Bengaluru. The company has delivered close to 200 units since launching sales in October from its first retail store in the southern city.
River’s first store in Bengaluru. Image Credits: River
Its ambitions are far larger, however. The scooters are manufactured at a 120,000-square-foot factory on the outskirts of Bengaluru that has an annual production capacity of 100,000 units (9,000 units a month). River says it plans to increase sales to 300 scooters a month in March and 3,000 units a month by the end of 2024.
“By the time we are a five-year-old company in March 2026, we want to be in 100 cities and come to a scale of selling around 9,000 vehicles a month, which is approximately $200 million in turnover,” Aravind Mani, co-founder and CEO of River, said in an interview.
To achieve its goals, the startup plans to establish a distributor network that will eventually handle 90% of its sales.
Mani told TechCrunch the startup began engagements with some dealers and is initially looking to have distributors in 10 cities, including Ahmedabad, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Kochi.
“We are having discussions with dealers for expansion,” he said. “We will also do more company-owned stores, depending on strategic locations.”
Mani co-founded River with Vipin George (chief product officer), previously working as a group head designer at Honda in India. The duo has deployed over $25 million in R&D and manufacturing in the first two and a half years and is now looking to scale River’s distribution, manufacturing and service network across the country, as well as work toward strengthening its R&D and draft the blueprint for its next product, which Mani said would come after the startup reaches to around 30 cities by March 2025 and 100 cities by March 2026.
“We have a couple of products in mind. But we do not know what we will prioritize and launch first yet. However, I can tell you that any product we do will be within this particular purview of utility,” Mani said.
After raising the first two rounds of funding from financial investors, Mani said River started to pivot to strategic investments. The first such investment came last year from Dubai’s Al-Futtaim Group, which is not just a large Middle Eastern conglomerate but also an exclusive Toyota distributor in the UAE that represents about 29 brands in around 14 countries.
The relationship could give River access to a global distribution network once it builds its presence in India. A similar case could be with Yamaha Motor.
“With Yamaha coming on board, there is also a strategic understanding to possibly collaborate on product lines, but we don’t have definitive agreements yet in place, or how that collaboration will look alike is not something that we have definitely agreements on. So, at this time, it’s a pure-play financial investment with the potential to collaborate more,” the co-founder noted.
That said, River, which has 450 employees, of which 250 are in R&D, seeks to use the partnership with Yamaha Motor to leverage its design and technology capability. Yamaha appears to have been sold on the company’s R&D efforts.
“We are impressed by the progress that River has achieved in such a short span of time, especially with the strong focus on design and technology. We are excited about the conviction that Aravind and Vipin have for River and how Yamaha can support the company to achieve this,” Hajime “Jim” Aota, chief general manager of New Business Development Centre at Yamaha Motor Company, said in a statement.
Mani did not disclose the valuation of the startup, though he mentioned “a significant increase in valuation, multiples of 10,” since its seed round in 2021. He also stated with the fresh funding, the startup has enough capital to last for two years.
The startup projects to reach gross margin profitability with 2,000 monthly units in 8 to 10 months. Bottom-line profitability would take a little longer, according to the co-founder.
Image Credits: Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu / Getty Images
Ford is cutting prices of its all-electric 2023 Mustang Mach-E by has much as $8,100 as the automaker attempts to rid itself of inventory and compete with Tesla and its increasingly cheaper EVs.
Total market share of new EV sales has grown, reaching nearly 8% in U.S. in 2023. But as market share has expanded, the consumer base has shifted from early adopters to early majority — a group unwilling to pay a premium for EVs, Ford CFO John Lawler told TechCrunch in an interview earlier this month.
The price cuts come after the Mach-E lost eligibility for a $3,750 tax credit and sales of the all-electric SUV fell 51% in January versus the same month in 2023. Overall EV sales were down 11% from January last year.
The Detroit Free Press previously reported the new prices, which were sent to the automaker’s network of dealers.
Ford confirmed with TechCrunch the price cuts, which are only for model year 2023 Mustang Mach-E vehicles and range between $3,100 and $8,100. Ford Credit is also offering a couple of deals, including 0% financing for 72 months for qualified buyers and a $7,500 cash incentive to those who lease. That extra incentive is in addition to the tax credit Ford Credit already passes on to consumers.
“The Mustang Mach-E is America’s No.2 EV SUV in 2023 and Ford is America’s No.2 EV brand,” Ford spokesperson Marty Günsberg wrote in an emailed statement. “We are adjusting pricing for MY23 models as we continue to adapt to the market to achieve the optimal mix of sales growth and customer value.”
Image Credits: Ford
Automakers, including Ford, have been racing to compete with Tesla amid softening demand for premium-priced EVs.
“Tesla ramped the 3 and the Y at the same time, which we believe created a false sense of demand,” Lawler said. “It was two new vehicles that was now in a segment, where it was affordable for early adopters and supply was very limited. And therefore, then you had this incredible growth, but their production was limited. And so it looked like there was this incredible demand, but it was the early adopters.”
Lawler said when Tesla started dropping prices, the conventional wisdom was that the company was trying to disrupt the industry and “keep the rest of us out.” Instead, he theorized that Tesla was responding to the same changing market conditions.
Tesla spent the latter half of 2022 and all of 2023 tinkering with the price of its four models: the Model S, Model X and popular Model 3 and Model Y vehicles. The company, which doesn’t use a dealership model and instead sells directly to consumers, slashed prices every quarter last year — a tactic that pumped up sales and drove down profits.
Tesla shipped a record number of electric vehicles in the fourth quarter, which helped it reach 1.81 million deliveries in 2023. Operating income also took a hit due to increased R&D costs, the ramp up of the Cybertruck and continued price cuts for its best-selling vehicles, the Model 3 and Model Y.
Apple is scuttling its secretive, long-running effort to build an autonomous electric car, executives announced in a short meeting with the team Tuesday morning. The company is likely cutting hundreds of employees from the team and all work on the project has stopped, TechCrunch has learned.
Some remaining employees will be shifted to Apple’s generative AI projects, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the project’s cancellation. Others will have 90 days to find a reassignment to other roles inside the company, or they will be let go. The car project still had around 1,400 employees working on it, according to one employee who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about their work.
The decision to kill the project comes at a time when major automakers are reevaluating their investments in electric vehicles, and amid increased scrutiny on autonomous vehicle projects. Apple’s entry into the automotive sector was also seen as a possible boon to its bottom line, giving it a new source of revenue to help bolster against stagnating hardware sales and regulatory threats to its services business. Apple declined to comment.
Apple first started working on its car project, known internally as “Project Titan,” in 2014. At one point, it had around 5,000 workers dedicated to the effort. But Apple pivoted repeatedly over the last decade, oscillating between an emphasis on making an all-electric Tesla competitor and a fully autonomous vehicle more akin to what Waymo has created. Most recently, Bloomberg reported in January that the project’s leadership was under pressure from Apple’s top executives and its board to find a way to bring something to market sooner than later.
Apple’s chief operating officer Jeff Williams and the vice president in charge of Titan, Kevin Lynch, announced the news to the team Tuesday in a short meeting that lasted about 12 minutes, and did not take questions, according to the employee. While this person described the announcement as abrupt, they said the decision was not, citing the constantly shifting priorities.
A number of high-profile automotive executives cycled through Project Titan over the years. Most notably, the project was once run by former Tesla executive Doug Field (who eventually left to take a role at Ford). Apple also poached executives from Lamborghini and Ford.
In 2021, it hired Ulrich Kranz, a former BMW executive who helped run the i3 program, away from EV startup Canoo. Apple once even held talks with Canoo as it searched the market for contract manufacturing partners, intellectual property, and talent. That search also included talks with Hyundai and Kia.
Cowboy is better known for its sleek electric bikes that you can see in many major cities across Europe. And if you look at the persons riding those Cowboy bikes, most of the time, you’ll see a young adult heading to an office with a laptop in a backpack.
That’s why the company is launching a brand-new bike called Cowboy Cross. It’s an all-road model that aims for comfort and long-distance trips.
I had the opportunity to see the new Cowboy Cross last week and take it for a test ride for a few minutes. When it comes to design, it definitely looks like a Cowboy bike with its pill-shaped front light, angular design and soft matte colors.
Similarly, Cowboy is betting on a fully integrated design with as little maintenance as possible. There’s no (physical) gear, braking cables are hidden as much as possible and the company uses carbon fiber belts.
What’s new with the Cowboy Cross are the tires. The wheels are slightly smaller (26.5 inches), but the custom-designed tires are much larger.
At the front of the bike, you’ll see front fork suspension. But unlike most road bikes, the front fork is inverted with the suspension near the wheel. In addition to a better design, that’s how Cowboy manages to hide the front brake cable in the frame.
There’s also a seat post suspension for navigating rough terrain. For both the front fork and the seat post, the suspensions can be adjusted with a screwdriver.
And if you’re a small person who just can’t ride a Cowboy bike due to your height, the saddle can go a bit lower on the new bike. The handlebar is a bit larger as well. Again, everything has been designed to make the Cowboy Cross more comfortable than existing Cowboy bikes.
Image Credits: Romain Dillet / TechCrunch
There are two designs for the aluminum frame as the Cowboy Cross is available in step-over and step-through variants. The bike is available in three different colors — light gray, dark gray and green. You’ll also find a rear rack that can support a child seat or various bags.
The battery is a bit larger with a 50% increase in capacity. The company claims that you should be able to ride for 60 to 120 km on (37 to 75 miles) on a single charge.
That’s about it for specifications. However, potential customers expect to keep their new bike for years to come. So it’s going to be important to make sure that the Cowboy Cross can easily be maintained over the long haul. But it’s hard to tell how it will fare on launch day. In addition to this hardware release, Cowboy is also announcing a new “Check My Bike” diagnostic tool.
Preorders start today with an early-bird price of €3,499 (that’s $3,800 at today’s exchange rate). Eventually, Cowboy expects to sell the Cowboy Cross for €3,999 ($4,350).
As a reminder, Cowboy’s “classic” bike models cost €2,699 ($2,940), but there are two software upgrades that cost €199 and €299 each. The €199 Cowboy Connect pack is included with the Cowboy Cross models.
“According to our studies, this will double our total addressable market,” Cowboy co-founder and CEO Adrien Roose told me. “I think it’s a different customer overall. It’s a customer who’s looking for more comfort. So they’re usually a little bit older and have a bit more budget.”
Image Credits: Romain Dillet / TechCrunch
In my test ride, I also played with Cowboy’s mobile app. This app hosts all the smart features of the electric bike. You can turn on the lights, switch between Eco mode and AdaptivePower, get turn-by-turn directions and see historical data. AdaptivePower is the feature that automatically adjusts the power of the motor depending on the current slope and weather conditions — and that was under the spotlight following a patent suit with eBikeLabs.
The company also added some minigames that should encourage you to push harder without distracting you too much. For instance, the app will tell you to push as much as possible during 30 seconds. Or the app might say that you’ve entered a popular segment and tell you if you’re faster than your friends.
These Strava-like features won’t replace Strava just yet — they can even be disabled in case you find them too distracting. But it’s interesting to see the company going down that road and making software a first-class citizen.
Different models for different needs
Cowboy mostly sells its bikes to customers living in Belgium (its home country), Germany, France, the Netherlands and the U.K. Instead of launching in new markets, the company has decided to expand its product range with more form factors.
“We mostly spent the first two years of the company prototyping. During the next five years, we refined our platform. Now we want to offer our product in different form factors to meet different needs,” Roose said. So you can expect other models in the coming months and years.
In July 2023, Cowboy’s main competitor VanMoof filed for bankruptcy. This led to a difficult summer for Cowboy, too, as many potential customers dismissed Cowboy’s products. “There was a big overlap of customers considering both VanMoof and Cowboy bikes,” Roose said.
But he now believes that Cowboy can move forward, as the company is in a different position than VanMoof. “There are about 100 employees at Cowboy. The figure I saw when they closed shop was that 700 people were working for VanMoof,” Roose said.
With a gross margin of 40% on each bike sold directly to consumer, Cowboy expects to become breakeven on an EBITDA basis this year and generate a net profit next year.
Image Credits: Chris Watt Photography (opens in a new window)
A Scottish company building one of the U.K.’s first all-electric intercity bus networks has raised $14 million (£11 million) in a Series A round as it looks to expand across the entire country.
Building any bus network from scratch — electric or otherwise — isn’t something anyone can conjure up overnight with a laptop and endless amounts of coffee. A bus network needs, well, buses — and lots of them. And that is what Keith Bradbury and Pierce Glennie have been doing since founding Ember out of Edinburgh back in 2019, starting initially with a single vehicle procured from one of the few manufacturers willing to take them seriously.
“In 2019, we didn’t have a [web] domain … we didn’t have anything, actually,” Bradbury told TechCrunch. “We were approaching these companies and telling them that we’d like to buy ‘one’ electric coach, because that’s all we had money for. Obviously, when you say you want to buy one electric coach, no one takes you seriously. Some companies laughed in our faces.”
One company that was willing to do business was China’s Yutong and its U.K. distributor Pelican, which sold Ember its first bus with little in the way of customizations beyond things like what materials they wanted the seats made of. Ember introduced its first bus route in late 2020, connecting Scotland’s capital Edinburgh with the city of Dundee (the birthplace of Grand Theft Auto, FYI), and in the intervening years it has expanded to Glasgow, Stirling, Perth, and other smaller pit stops within and between these cities.
Today, Ember counts 24 buses in operation, though it has just taken receipt of an additional 14 next-gen vehicles from Yutong, which sport an increased 563 kWh battery capable of powering 510 km of travel on a single charge — this compares to around 380 km for the previous generation bus.
“Now we’re up to 38, we have the option of actually talking about serious numbers with Yutong and starting to get vehicles built to our specification,” Bradbury said. “Our new generation vehicle didn’t actually exist 18 months ago. While it’s not being built just for Ember, the product development has had a lot of input from us — we were closely involved with the design, with the battery layout, and with the actual architecture of the vehicle. There were some things that we couldn’t change, and there were some things that we could change, but we’ve been able to really input into that process.”
The company has so far raised a little north of $2.3 million in seed funding from European climate tech investors, including Blue Impact, Pale Blue Dot, Contrarian Ventures, Monzo co-founder Tom Blomfield, and Gareth Williams (co-founder of Edinburgh-based unicorn Skyscanner). And with its fresh cash injection, it’s gearing up for expansion across Scotland and the broader U.K. market.
Ember’s Series A round was led by Inven Capital, 2150 and AENU, with participation from some of its existing backers too.
The company is taking a “full-stack” approach to its fleet development, with control over just about every aspect of the fleet, from manufacturing and charging infrastructure, to customer service, to all the underlying software that pulls everything together.
Full-stack
Ember’s electric bus. Image Credits: Ember
Both the old and newer versions of Ember’s buses are powered by lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries, which are cobalt-free and considered more environmentally friendly. However, in addition to greater capacity, the latest version has much speedier charging at 600 kW — this 400% increase means that its buses can be fully charged in less than an hour.
On top of that, the buses are bigger, with room for 53 passengers versus 38 in the previous vehicles, while the luggage capacity has more than doubled.
Internally, the buses sport 5G Wi-Fi and USB charging ports.
Inside Ember. Image Credits: Ember
For now, Ember counts a single main charging hub in Dundee, with 1,200 kW of charging capacity that is backed up by on-site wind turbines. However, with a fleet of new buses incoming and plans to expand its network farther afield, the company is looking to add an additional 4 megawatts of charging capacity across more sites in Scotland this year.
“Charging hubs will be in a mixture of private and public locations, and range in size,” Bradbury said.
Ember uses a CCS (combined charging system) EV charging system, which supports both AC and DC charging through a single plug — this is a common standard across Europe and elsewhere, meaning that they technically aren’t for Ember’s use only. In theory, Ember could help alleviate the perennial charging infrastructure problem that plagues the U.K. (among most other countries), though Bradbury reckons that it will likely require most of them for its own operations.
“Our day-to-day usage is so intensive that there is limited spare capacity for sharing access with third parties,” he said. “However, we do envisage enabling this in some locations as the network grows, especially for commercial fleets who require more space and much higher charging speeds.”
Ember charging hub in Dundee. Image Credits: Ember
Under the hood, Ember’s proprietary EmberOS software automates many of the processes involved in managing a fleet. For example, it automatically allocates drivers and vehicles for specific shifts and routes, and if one of the buses is scheduled for maintenance on a given day, Ember removes that from the roster so that there aren’t any unexpected issues around vehicle shortages.
On top of that, EmberOS also monitors the service for issues, such as unexpected charging problems, a no-show driver, on-bus temperature controls, and traffic-related delays.
“If an issue is detected, EmberOS will either resolve it automatically — for example, notifying passengers about a delay or prompting the driver to turn up the heating — or flag it to a human in the operations team,” Bradbury said. “Over time, more and more issues are able to be resolved fully automatically, with no human input.”
On the consumer side, passengers can access real-time data about the schedule of their bus, including the one that they’re currently on, or a prospective bus they want to catch but don’t want to hang around waiting for.
Ember passenger app. Image Credits: Ember
And it’s this software underbelly that Bradbury reckons is the secret sauce that elevates it above not only traditional intercity bus companies, but also other would-be rivals, including established incumbents like the mighty Stagecoach.
“We have a strong belief in the benefit of controlling the full stack to really get radical improvements in efficiency,” Bradbury said. “We’re not trying to create an incremental improvement in a specific vertical; we’re rebuilding the entire stack to create a model that doesn’t currently exist in the market. It’s only by linking up the software with the hardware and the operational playbook that this can happen.”
The story so far
Prior to Ember, Bradbury and his co-founder Glennie worked in various roles at London-based fintech Iwoca. Going from developing credit financing software and services for small businesses to building electric buses might not be the most obvious career transition to make, but it’s a decision that Bradbury and Glennie made after discussing a shared interest in addressing the climate crisis and the role that electrification could play in that.
“We’re not ‘bus people’; we were living in London, working for a fintech — building a SaaS company, effectively,” Bradbury said. “We both decided that we wanted to do something new, and we were really interested in how electrification had the potential to change industries.”
And while Bradbury says he can appreciate the broad gamut of efforts to address climate change, he wanted a solution where the fruits of their labor were a little more near-term.
“I think there’s lots of cool stuff like ‘green concrete‘ or ‘nuclear fusion‘ — in a way I’d love to work on all of those as well, but actually, they’re not tangible from day one,” Bradbury said. “You’re doing all of this R&D, building for something that will come to fruition in 10 or 20 years, and it will have an absolutely massive impact. But we were quite keen to do something that could have impact from the very beginning, so we looked at the vehicles, the electrification and the possibility for all of that.”
While megabucks incumbents such as Stagecoach have also embraced electric buses, those efforts tend to be more within cities rather than between cities. And the role that software plays in these various efforts is also minimal.
“When we looked at the legacy industry, we did not see innovation,” Bradbury said. “Maybe this is how people were looking at fintech in the 2000s, and lots of good companies came out of that. We have kind of done the same with transport — we can look at this with fresh eyes, and come up with a completely novel way of doing it.”
Why Scotland?
A quick peek across Ember’s home city reveals at least one more fairly novel transport initiative called CavForth, touted as the U.K.’s first public autonomous bus service. Operated by Stagecoach, the pilot scheme currently operates a 20-minute park-and-ride service in the west of Edinburgh, albeit with a safety driver on board just in case.
So what is it about Scotland that is attracting novel public transport services? And why up sticks from Bristol, where Bradbury was living, and launch his electric bus network north of the border? While part of it did come down to a Scottish government with slightly more ambitious net-zero plans than its Westminster counterpart, Scotland’s size and layout played a major part in convincing Bradbury to launch his venture from Scotland.
“Scotland is not a special market from a public transport perspective — there are lots of countries with similar road and rail networks, similar levels of car ownership and so on,” Bradbury said. “However, the size of the market makes it an interesting place to pilot services. It’s large enough to build a proper network, but small enough to iterate rapidly. Scotland is a very good size — you can demonstrate that network at what we describe as ‘mini scale.’ You can demonstrate the network effects, and you can demonstrate passenger demand, and you can do all of that stuff without needing tons and tons of money.”
While Ember is somewhat limited in terms of geographical coverage right now, Bradbury says that it’s gearing up for a wider expansion that will include extending deeper across Scotland with charging hubs planned for Aberdeen, Inverness, Fort William, and Oban. And then next year, they’ll look at England, with the specific routes yet to be determined.
“There’s lots of different routes in England that would work for us, especially when you think about the range of the vehicles now — they can do 500 kilometers-plus, which gives us a lot of scope,” Bradbury said. “All of these hubs that will be going live [in Scotland] will allow us to ‘complete’ the Scottish network in a way, and that demonstrates that what’s already working with tens of thousands of passengers a week can apply elsewhere.”
