Ridesharing and transportation platform Didi Chuxing announced today that it has formed a joint venture with BP, the British gas, oil and energy company, to build electric-vehicle charging infrastructure in China. The charging stations will be available to Didi and non-Didi drivers.
The news of Didi and BP’s joint venture comes one week after Didi announced that it had received funding totaling $600 million from Toyota Motor Corporation. As part of that deal, Didi and Toyota Motor set up a joint venture with GAC Toyota Motor to provide vehicle-related services to Didi drivers.
BP’s first charging site in Guangzhou has already been connected to XAS (Xiaoju Automobile Solutions), which Didi spun out in April 2018 to put all its vehicle-related services into one platform.
XAS is part of Didi Chuxing’s evolution from a ridesharing company to a mobility services platform, with its services available to other car, transportation and logistics companies. In June, Didi also opened its ridesharing platform to other companies, enabling its users to request rides from third-party providers in a bid to better compete with apps like Meituan Dianping and AutoNavi, which aggregate several ride-hailing services on their platforms.
Didi says it now offers ridesharing, vehicle rental and delivery services to 550 million users and covers 1,000 cities through partnerships with Grab, Lyft, Ola, 99 and Bolt (Taxify). The company also claims to be the world’s largest electric vehicle operator with more than 600,000 EVs on its platform.
It also has partnerships with automakers and other car-related companies, like Toyota, FAW, Dongfeng, GAC, Volkswagen and Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, to collaborate on a platform that uses new energy and AI-based and mobility technologies.
In a press statement, Tufan Erginbilgic, the CEO of BP’s Downstream business, said “As the world’s largest EV market, China offers extraordinary opportunities to develop innovative new businesses at scale and we see this as the perfect partnership for such a fast-evolving environment. The lessons we learn here will help us further expand BP’s advanced mobility business worldwide, helping drive the energy transition and develop solutions for a low carbon world.”
