Der Spiegel: Volkswagen is planning to write off over $300M it invested in Gett, as the Israeli startup struggles to compete with Uber, Lyft, Didi, and others
Globes Online :
Context & Ripple Effects
Volkswagen's Gett bet was meant to be its shortcut into ride-hailing: the $300M investment in 2016 made VW both shareholder and partner, and VW doubled down just six months ago by leading an $80M round at a ~$1.4B valuation on Gett's promise of profitability by early next year. The reported write-off signals that thesis has collapsed against the scale of Uber, Lyft, and Didi.
The timing matters because VW is not exiting mobility — it is rerouting it. Two months ago VW and Intel's Mobileye announced New Mobility, a commercial autonomous ride-hailing service launching in Israel in 2019, which puts VW's capital behind owned autonomy rather than a minority stake in a struggling consumer app.
First-order effects
- Volkswagen takes an impairment of over $300M on its Gett stake, erasing most of the book value of its 2016 entry into ride-hailing.
- Gett loses the public backing of its anchor automotive investor at the moment it is being outspent by Uber, Lyft, and Didi, weakening its position ahead of future fundraising.
Second-order effects
- Gett will need to reframe its story for new capital — the B2B corporate-ride angle rather than consumer scale — since the VW-led consumer bet has failed to close the gap with the global leaders.
- Didi's overseas expansion push, which drove its international revenue up 47% year-over-year to $638M in Q4 even as it posted a $43.48M net loss, shows the incumbents are still spending aggressively in exactly the markets where subscale players like Gett compete.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, legacy automakers will conclude that minority stakes in ride-hailing startups do not buy relevance against platform leaders, and shift mobility capital toward owned software and autonomy stacks — a direction VW's later multibillion-dollar software restructuring confirms.
- Ride-hailing consolidates structurally around a few global platforms with the balance sheets to sustain losses, leaving regional players to survive only in niches like corporate travel or as partners in manufacturer-controlled autonomous fleets.
The trend: Automaker equity stakes in ride-hailing startups are giving way to direct investment in proprietary software and autonomous fleets, as VW's Gett write-off and Mobileye partnership illustrate.