Zipcar’s rivals consider London expansion after it reveals UK exit
Several car-sharing companies are considering launching or expanding in London, with the imminent closure of Zipcar’s UK operation leaving a large gap in the market in one of Europe’s biggest cities.Free2Move, owned by the carmaker Stellantis, said it was “closely monitoring the London market”, and “actively assessing” options for its services.It already operates fleets in cities including Berlin, Paris, Rome and Washington DC.Enterprise Car Club, which already has some cars in London, said it “will continue to seek out opportunities to expand our network and provide people with alternative transport options by the hour or day”.Co Wheels, which operates across the UK and with a handful of cars in the capital, said it was “actively discussing” options with several London boroughs in recent days.
The peer-to-peer car-sharing companies Hiyacar and Turo also said they hoped to expand the number of car owners using their platforms in London.Zipcar last week announced a plan to close its UK operation at the end of the year, in a blow to advocates of car sharing and to as many as half a million users.London is seen as one of the most promising cities in Europe for car sharing because it has a big population that largely relies on public transport rather than owning their own cars to get around.However, experts have said that the fragmented nature of licensing and parking prices across 33 London local authorities has been a huge barrier to car clubs.For instance, Zipcar’s floating cars, which have no fixed parking spot, were not allowed to park within the central borough of Camden and the City of London, among other areas.
Free2Move suggested that its interest was not at a developed stage, but that it might consider the city.Free2Move operates fleets of floating vehicles, which are accessed via its app.It said: “London is among Europe’s most advanced cities when it comes to readiness for autonomous mobility, which makes it a particularly compelling market for us.“Free2move is taking a long-term view, focused on autonomous and fully digital mobility solutions, and we are actively assessing how our experience in car sharing and fleet operations could evolve to support a city like London in the future.”Launching a new car club fleet would entail significant investment in vehicles, and would probably take some time for Free2Move or a competitor.
Any plans for Free2Move to launch in London could be complicated if Stellantis, the owner of car brands including Peugeot, Vauxhall and Fiat, decides to sell the business, as reported by Bloomberg in October.Peer-to-peer companies have a less financially onerous task, as they link existing owners of vehicles to potential renters, without having to spend heavily on fleets of cars.Hiyacar and Turo already operate in London, and both said they spied an opportunity to expand and persuade more owners to list their cars.The Hiyacar chief executive, Don Iro, said: “Our vision is to now take on the market.We’re in a unique position to scale.
”He added that the company was “always going to do this irrespective of Zipcar”, but its abandonment of the market “gives us the ammunition to expand”.Richard Dilks, the chief executive of CoMoUK, a shared transport charity, said he had been involved in several discussions with London boroughs and Transport for London over what needed to happen to attract more players, including having a single process across boroughs and lower fees.“Almost certainly there’s going to be a big cliff-edge gap,” he said.“I can see some signs of progress, but hypothetical at the moment.It’s going to be a long haul, this.
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Disney wants you to AI-generate yourself into your favorite Marvel movie
Users of OpenAI’s video generation app will soon be able to see their own faces alongside characters from Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars and Disney’s animated films, according to a joint announcement from the startup and Disney on Thursday. Perhaps you, Lightning McQueen and Iron Man are all dancing together in the Mos Eisley Cantina.Sora is an app made by OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT, which allows users to generate videos of up to 20 seconds through short text prompts. The startup previously attempted to steer Sora’s output away from unlicensed copyrighted material, though with little success, which prompted threats of lawsuits by rights holders.Disney announced that it would invest $1bn in OpenAI and, under a three-year deal perhaps worth even more than that large sum, that it would license about 200 of its iconic characters – from R2-D2 to Stitch – for users to play with in OpenAI’s video generation app
Musk calls Doge only ‘somewhat successful’ and says he would not do it again
Elon Musk has said the aggressive federal job-cutting program he headed early in Donald Trump’s second term, known as the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), was only “a little bit successful” and he would not lead the project again.Musk said he wouldn’t want to repeat the exercise, talking on the podcast hosted by Katie Miller, a rightwing personality with a rising profile who was a Doge adviser and who is married to Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s hardline anti-immigration deputy chief of staff.Asked whether Doge had achieved what he’d hoped, Musk said: “We were a little bit successful. We were somewhat successful.”Doge created chaos and distress in the government machine in Washington DC, and by May more than 200,000 federal workers had been laid off and roughly 75,000 had accepted buyouts as a result of purges by Musk’s external team of often-young zealots
ICE is using smartwatches to track pregnant women, even during labor: ‘She was so afraid they would take her baby’
Pregnant immigrants in ICE monitoring programs are avoiding care, fearing detention during labor and deliveryIn early September, a woman, nine months pregnant, walked into the emergency obstetrics unit of a Colorado hospital. Though the labor and delivery staff caring for her expected her to have a smooth delivery, her case presented complications almost immediately.The woman, who was born in central Asia, checked into the hospital with a smartwatch on her wrist, said two hospital workers who cared for her during her labor, and whom the Guardian is not identifying to avoid exposing their hospital or patients to retaliation.The device was not an ordinary smartwatch made by Apple or Samsung, but a special type that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had mandated the woman wear at all times, allowing the agency to track her. The device was beeping when she entered the hospital, indicating she needed to charge it, and she worried that if the battery died, ICE agents would think she was trying to disappear, the hospital workers recalled
From ‘glacier aesthetic’ to ‘poetcore’: Pinterest predicts the visual trends of 2026 based on its search data
Next year, we’ll mostly be indulging in maximalist circus decor, working on our poetcore, hunting for the ethereal or eating cabbage in a bid for “individuality and self-preservation”, according to Pinterest.The organisation’s predictions for Australian trends in 2026 have landed, which – according to the platform used by interior decorators, fashion lovers and creatives of all stripes – includes 1980s, aliens, vampires and “forest magic”.Among the Pinterest 2026 trends report’s top 21 themes are “Afrohemian” decor (searches for the term are on the rise by baby boomers and Gen X); “glitchy glam” (asymmetric haircuts and mismatching nails); and “cool blue” (drinks, wedding dresses and makeup with a “glacier aesthetic”).Pinterest compared English-language search data from September 2024 to August 2025 with those of the year before and claims it has an 88% accuracy rate. More than 9 million Australians use Pinterest each month
UK police forces lobbied to use biased facial recognition technology
Police forces successfully lobbied to use a facial recognition system known to be biased against women, young people, and members of ethnic minority groups, after complaining that another version produced fewer potential suspects.UK forces use the police national database (PND) to conduct retrospective facial recognition searches, whereby a “probe image” of a suspect is compared to a database of more than 19 million custody photos for potential matches.The Home Office admitted last week that the technology was biased, after a review by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) found it misidentified Black and Asian people and women at significantly higher rates than white men, and said it “had acted on the findings”.Documents seen by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates reveal that the bias has been known about for more than a year – and that police forces argued to overturn an initial decision designed to address it.Police bosses were told the system was biased in September 2024, after a Home Office-commissioned review by the NPL found the system was more likely to suggest incorrect matches for probe images depicting women, Black people, and those aged 40 and under
Trump clears way for Nvidia to sell powerful AI chips to China
Donald Trump has cleared the way for Nvidia to begin selling its powerful AI computer chips to China, marking a win for the chip maker and its CEO, Jensen Huang, who has spent months lobbying the White House to open up sales in the country.Before Monday’s announcement, the US had prohibited sales of Nvidia’s most advanced chips to China over national security concerns.Trump posted to Truth Social on Monday: “I have informed President Xi, of China, that the United States will allow NVIDIA to ship its H200 products to approved customers in China, and other Countries, under conditions that allow for continued strong National Security. President Xi responded positively!”Trump said the Department of Commerce was finalising the details and that he was planning to make the same offer to other chip companies, including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel. Nvidia’s H200 chips are the company’s second most powerful, and far more advanced than the H20, which was originally designed as a lower-powered model for the Chinese market that would not breach restrictions, but which the US banned anyway in April
Zipcar’s rivals consider London expansion after it reveals UK exit
Trump demands Fed listen to him as he lines up new leader: ‘I’m a smart voice’
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