As society embraces the sharing economy, a quest for convenience and sustainability is reshaping transportation norms. Jaguar’s car-sharing pilot aims to offer an on-demand taste of luxury and all-electric living, a vision the brand is committed to expanding as it evolves beyond its traditional offerings.

In collaboration with luxury serviced apartment group MODA Living, Jaguar has chosen two upscale apartment complexes, Angel Gardens in Manchester and New York Square in Leeds, as its pilot locations. Residents in these buildings can effortlessly book an I-PACE for up to 48 hours using the dedicated Jaguar booking platform. Furthermore, each site’s 24-hour concierge team will facilitate key handovers and offer support. The booking covers insurance, charging costs, valeting, and maintenance.

The Jaguar I-PACE, since its debut, has received over 90 global awards, including the remarkable triple victory at the 2019 World Car of the Year Awards. Winning World Car Design of the Year, World Green Car, and World Car of the Year, the I-PACE has solidified its position as the benchmark all-electric performance SUV. Jaguar’s innovative mobility scheme promises to bring this award-winning luxury to the doorsteps of urban residents, ushering in a new era of convenient and sustainable transportation.

As with Uber Eats and Uber Connect, couriers can now drop off or pick up the package (up to 80kg) from the customer’s door. Uber Connect only officially makes use of motorbikes with a 15kg limit option. Customers will be able to add delivery notes or instructions for their driver before pickup or delivery — it’s probably worth letting them know about a fragile package, for instance.

Uber Connect also comes with two new features that will enhance the delivery experience. In response to a strong customer need Uber has witnessed, concurrent trips are now available, meaning users can send multiple packages to different destinations at the same time. In addition, proof of delivery via PIN will be rolled out. The PIN provides users with peace of mind that their package is being delivered to the right person, allowing for ease of reference where there are multiple deliveries. 

Other companies have offered similar services for years, such as WumDrop. Still, Uber Connect’s expansion suggests the service has proven popular enough to make it part of the company’s offerings on a much broader basis, helping families and friends in thousands of towns and cities to quickly send each other items.

Uber has noted there are with over 200 000 unique users across SSA making use of this delivery option each month.

The local Mini Sharing pilot programme is based at BlackBrick in Sandton, a “vertical village” on the centrally located Fredman Drive. The Mini Sharing service is available exclusively to residents of BlackBrick, and members of the BlackBrick Club.

The company says it’s offering a fleet of its electric MINI Cooper SE.

Pricing is done by the mileage and time, which can make the service seem pretty expensive at first, but keep in mind that it’s designed to be used for quick trips around the city. Think Uber. This is reinforced with the fact that Mini Sharing allows one-way trips, which means drivers can leave the car after one ride, as long as it’s parked within a specified area. All prices are inclusive of insurance, electricity, toll fees and other associated costs.

Mini and its big brother BMW has offered similar car-sharing services throughout Europe, and while it’s debuting in Jozi, the car company says it will eventually be available in more areas and cities.

The crash saw Uber put its autonomous research on hold, but efforts resumed later in the year. This newest vehicle takes the lessons learned by that incident – along with other testing in select US cities – and rolls it into an SUV that’s said to be ready for production.

It’s based on the Volvo XC90, itself refreshed recently. Volvo and Uber inked a deal back in 2016 on driverless vehicles, with the Swedish automaker agreeing to produce a base vehicle for the firm. Although at first glance it may look like a regular XC90, in fact there are numerous differences.

Most significant is the hardware redundancy. The car has back-up systems for several of the key components, including steering, braking, and battery back-up. Should the primary brakes fail, for example, the secondary system kicks in automatically to bring the SUV to a halt.

Cameras and ultrasonic sensors have been built into the front, rear, and sides of the XC90. There’s a camera built into the Volvo badge on the front grille, for example, and further cameras underneath the side mirrors. Each gets its own water-jet washing system, so that road dirt or bugs don’t occlude the car’s systems. Together with the other sensors, it gives the car a 360-degree perspective.

That, though, isn’t enough to make it fully autonomous. For that, Uber adds its own self-driving system, which installs on the top of the SUV. It includes LIDAR, along with more cameras and other sensing technology, plus the computational processing to crunch through all that data generated.

The deal between the two firms has been an interesting one. Back when Uber’s car crashed last year, Volvo was clear that the autonomous technology involved was Uber’s own, not the automaker’s. However, Volvo will be using the base car design for its own driverless efforts, only with different software, among other changes.

“Volvo Cars plans to use a similar autonomous base vehicle concept for the introduction of its future autonomous drive cars in the early 2020s,” the company says. “These technologies, to be introduced on the next generation of Volvo models based on the SPA2 vehicle architecture, will include features designed to enable unsupervised autonomous drive in clearly designated areas such as highways and ring roads.”

If all goes to plan, Uber aims to buy tens of thousands of the cars from Volvo to build out its driverless fleet. For the moment, though, there’ll still be a “Mission Specialist” – Uber’s term for the human safety driver who sits, poised, ready to take over in the case of an emergency – behind the wheel.