Jean-Christophe Labarre is the head of strategy and partnerships at Mobilize, Renault Group’s new unit dedicated to mobility services. Labarre, who was previously head of new mobility at the Renault-Nissan Alliance as well as managing director of the Alliance Ventures fund, is working to build a mobility ecosystem with the target of producing 20 percent of Renault Group’s automotive turnover by 2030. Labarre spoke with Automotive News Europe News Editor Peter Sigal at the recent Munich auto show, where Mobilize presented a full range of purpose-built electric vehicles for mobility services: The Limo, for ride-hailing; the Duo, for micromobility; the Bento, for microdelivery; and the Hippo, for last-mile delivery.
If you had to make a movie pitch describing Mobilize, what would you say?
I really like our motto, which is "Beyond automotive." It's what we need to do make sure that we can come up with the best mobility services, the best energy services to address pain points in your personal and professional lives. It's making sure we can make the best of two worlds, the automaker world and the service world. We've been very good at making cars for 120 years. How do we take the best of this and plug it into future businesses like mobility services or energy services? We’ll offer simple, affordable solutions to a broader audience. So if this is a movie, it's a mainsteam movie, not a niche movie. Renault is a populist carmaker; we want to be the same for mobility.
You have a lot of partners, for example with iCabbi on taxi dispatch technology, with AMPS of Germany for battery second-life, and RCI Bank has recently acquired Bipi, a subscription platform for used cars. How do you manage all these?
All of these startups and partners have ingredients we need to come up with the right recipe. Bipi, for example, is a multi-brand, subuscription-based used car service in the B2C (business to consumer) segment. We could also leverage it for B2B (business to business) subscriptions to give people flexibility in mileage. We need their competencies, their skills, their platforms.