Best of LinkedIn: Future Mobility & Market Evolution CW 05/ 06

00:00:00: Brought to you by Thomas Allgaier and Frennis, this edition highlights key LinkedIn posts on future mobility and market evolution in weeks five and six.

00:00:07: Frennis supports enterprises with market and competitive intelligence, decoding disruptive technologies, customer needs, regulatory change, and competitive moves.

00:00:16: So product teams and strategy leaders don't just react, but shape the future of mobility.

00:00:23: Welcome back to the deep dive.

00:00:25: We are looking at the start of February, twenty, twenty six, uh, specifically weeks five and six.

00:00:30: And looking at the stack of research you've brought, it feels like the theme isn't just new tech anymore.

00:00:34: It feels like we're dealing with the, well.

00:00:37: the messy reality of actually trying to use this stuff.

00:00:40: That is a perfect way to frame it.

00:00:42: I mean, if the last few years were all about the wow factor of prototypes, these two weeks have been about the how

00:00:46: fact.

00:00:46: A how factor.

00:00:47: Yeah, how do you fit a robot taxi into a narrow London street?

00:00:50: How do you make the math work for a rural bus that, you know, almost nobody rides?

00:00:55: We are moving from invention to integration.

00:00:58: Integration

00:00:59: sounds a lot less sexy than invention.

00:01:01: Ha, maybe.

00:01:02: But I guess that's where the survival is.

00:01:03: We're seeing a clear shift from isolated pilots trying to scale up, micromobility is really growing up, and city infrastructure is just trying to catch up.

00:01:13: OK, so let's start with the big headline grabber.

00:01:16: Autonomous mobility, AI.

00:01:19: The RoboTaxi.

00:01:21: Of course.

00:01:22: It feels like every time I open my feed, there's another city being promised a driverless future.

00:01:27: It's accelerating, no doubt.

00:01:29: The activity has just exploded in the last fortnight, and we have to start with, you know, the elephant in the room.

00:01:36: Right.

00:01:36: They

00:01:37: officially launched the driverless RoboTaxi service in Austin.

00:01:42: And from what I saw, the markets went absolutely berserk.

00:01:45: Oh, completely.

00:01:46: They were throwing around these valuation numbers.

00:01:48: that just didn't seem real.

00:01:49: Was it something like nine trillion dollars?

00:01:51: The market reaction was, let's just say, enthusiastic.

00:01:55: But we need to look past the stock ticker.

00:01:56: Dr.

00:01:57: Gabriel Cyberth posted a really necessary reality check on this.

00:02:01: He's calling for what he terms, bare-case math.

00:02:04: Bear case math.

00:02:05: I like that.

00:02:05: So basically stripping away all the hype.

00:02:08: Exactly.

00:02:09: He's arguing that we need to look at the unit economics of a single ride.

00:02:13: You know, if you strip away the whole tech company multiple, does a robotaxi fleet actually generate more profit per mile than a standard Uber?

00:02:22: You've got the cost of the sensors, the massive computing power, remote operation centers, liability insurance.

00:02:28: Cybers suggests that if you do the math, this might not look like a high-margin software business.

00:02:34: It might look more like a heavy asset logistics business.

00:02:36: Precisely.

00:02:38: Which, you know, usually trades at a much, much lower valuation.

00:02:41: But to be fair to the... bulls.

00:02:43: Well, yeah, there was a major operational milestone.

00:02:45: Brock Saas confirmed it.

00:02:46: What was that?

00:02:47: Tesla is running that Austin service without Safety Drive.

00:02:50: Okay, that is a big deal.

00:02:52: Usually when we hear driverless, there's secretly a guy in the front seat just hovering his hands over the wheel.

00:02:57: Not here.

00:02:58: The seat is empty.

00:02:59: And that psychological shift for the passenger and for the other drivers on the road, that's significant.

00:03:04: Sure.

00:03:04: But Austin is one thing.

00:03:06: It's wide.

00:03:07: It's a grid.

00:03:08: The weather is generally predictable.

00:03:10: The real test is coming to Europe.

00:03:12: I saw that.

00:03:14: Andreas Kubli highlighted a report that Uber is planning to launch in Zurich.

00:03:18: By

00:03:18: the end of this year.

00:03:19: And Zurich is not Austin.

00:03:21: You've got trams, narrow medieval streets, snow.

00:03:25: It's a completely different level of complexity, but if you think Zurich is tough, look at London.

00:03:30: Right.

00:03:30: Francisco Geronimo spotted a Waymo there.

00:03:33: A

00:03:33: Waymo.

00:03:34: Physically on the streets of London.

00:03:36: Wait, Waymo was actually testing in London.

00:03:39: I thought they were sticking to the sunny American Southwest.

00:03:41: Not anymore.

00:03:42: Cacique, Catrion confirmed they are targeting a Q for twenty twenty six launch for services there.

00:03:49: Wow.

00:03:50: And just think about what that means.

00:03:51: London is arguably one of the most hostile driving environments on earth.

00:03:56: You have cyclists weaving in and out, double-decker buses, black cabs that just own the road.

00:04:01: Tourists looking the wrong way before they cross the street.

00:04:03: Exactly.

00:04:04: If they can make it work in London, they can make it work anywhere.

00:04:07: But Catrion raised a point that I found really interesting.

00:04:10: He wasn't just talking about navigation.

00:04:11: What was it?

00:04:12: He was talking about the trolley problem.

00:04:14: Ah, okay.

00:04:15: This is where it gets heavy.

00:04:16: It does.

00:04:16: I mean, the trolley problem has been a philosophy seminar staple for decades, right?

00:04:21: Do you swerve to hit one person to save five?

00:04:25: But Katrina's point is that for Waymo and London, this isn't philosophy anymore.

00:04:29: It's code.

00:04:30: So someone actually has to program the car to decide who gets hit in a worst case scenario.

00:04:36: In a way, yes.

00:04:38: As these fleets scale from a few dozen cars to thousands, statistical probability says accidents will happen.

00:04:44: The question is, how does the algorithm prioritize safety?

00:04:50: The

00:04:50: cyclist, and maybe more importantly, how do we as a society hold that code accountable?

00:04:55: That ties right into something Philip Koopman was discussing.

00:04:58: He's usually pretty critical of how these companies talk about safety.

00:05:01: He

00:05:01: is, and for good reason.

00:05:03: He takes issue with the industry's tendency to label a crash unavoidable just because the car couldn't stop in the last half a second.

00:05:10: His argument is all about contextual risk.

00:05:13: What does that mean in practice?

00:05:14: Well, think about a human driver.

00:05:16: If you see a ball roll into the street, you slowed before you see the child chasing it.

00:05:20: You anticipate.

00:05:22: Koopman argues that a robotaxi can't just have fast reaction times.

00:05:26: It needs that contextual foresight.

00:05:29: If a car hits someone and the company says, well, we applied the brakes instantly, Koopman says that's not enough.

00:05:36: A competent human would have already slowed down.

00:05:38: A competent human would have slowed down ten seconds ago because the context looked dangerous.

00:05:43: That's a really

00:05:43: high bar.

00:05:44: It's asking the AI to have... What?

00:05:47: Intuition?

00:05:48: Or at least a very, very deep understanding of human unpredictability.

00:05:52: But, you know, while we focus on these robotaxes, there's a less glamorous side of autonomy that might actually pay off sooner.

00:05:58: Jan Gramatica is looking at buses.

00:06:00: Buses.

00:06:01: Like, self-driving city buses.

00:06:03: Eventually.

00:06:04: But he suggests a depot-first

00:06:06: path.

00:06:07: Depot first.

00:06:08: So, like, automating the parking lot.

00:06:09: Exactly.

00:06:10: Think about the time and money spent just moving buses around the Depot, washing them, parking them, charging them, getting them to the start of the route.

00:06:17: It's a controlled environment.

00:06:18: No kids chasing balls.

00:06:20: Mm-hmm.

00:06:20: Grammatica argues you get a much faster return on investment by automating the Depot than by trying to replace the driver on a busy route immediately.

00:06:28: That makes total sense.

00:06:29: It's the boring autonomy that actually saves money.

00:06:33: Boring but profitable is a recurring theme here.

00:06:36: And speaking of efficiency, Keith Richmond shared a conversation with the CEO of Voi, Frederick

00:06:41: Helm.

00:06:41: Right, about AI, but not for driving the scooters.

00:06:45: This was about their internal operations.

00:06:47: Yes.

00:06:48: Helm talked about moving from text to text, like asking chat GPT to write an email to

00:06:53: text to action.

00:06:54: Okay, what's the difference there?

00:06:55: Text to action means the AI actually executes a workflow.

00:06:59: So they've built these custom internal tools where the AI connects to their databases and their systems.

00:07:04: Helm claimed they cut half their SAWS software stack.

00:07:08: Half.

00:07:09: Half.

00:07:10: Because they just built their own AI tools to handle the work.

00:07:13: That is a massive cost saving.

00:07:14: It is.

00:07:15: And it aligns perfectly with what Giuliano Laguria is saying.

00:07:18: He argues AI is becoming structural infrastructure.

00:07:21: It's shifting from a feature, you know, oh, this car has AI to the entire ecosystem.

00:07:26: It's the invisible layer.

00:07:27: It's the invisible layer that optimizes the fleet, balances the energy grid, predicts demand.

00:07:32: It's not just the robot driver, it's the robot manager.

00:07:35: Which is a perfect segue into our second theme.

00:07:38: Micromobility.

00:07:40: Because if AI is the robot manager, the things being managed are increasingly scooters and e-bikes.

00:07:46: And it feels like this sector is finally maturing.

00:07:49: It's consolidating, certainly.

00:07:50: It's moving from being seen as toys to being seen as legitimate transport.

00:07:56: But the politics.

00:07:57: The political narrative is, well, it's

00:07:59: complicated.

00:08:00: I saw a post from a user on LinkedIn.

00:08:03: I think his handle was Chinggis' can, and he went out a bit of a rant about this.

00:08:06: It was a very validating rant for the industry.

00:08:08: He pointed out the cycle.

00:08:09: First, officials hated shared e-bikes.

00:08:12: Then they realized e-bikes replaced cars, so now they love them.

00:08:15: They're the golden solution now.

00:08:17: Exactly.

00:08:18: But now they've just shifted that hostility onto e-steps, scooters.

00:08:22: Even though an e-step takes up less space than a bike.

00:08:24: And is often more energy efficient.

00:08:26: It's the new innovation backlash.

00:08:27: Governments say they want to reduce car usage, but then they regulate against the very devices people choose to use instead.

00:08:33: To be

00:08:34: fair though, the complaints about scooters usually aren't about the riding, they're about the parking, the clutter.

00:08:40: True.

00:08:40: sidewalks blocked by piles of scooters.

00:08:43: But Thomas Burton from Spark Park points out that this is often a technology failure, not just bad behavior.

00:08:49: He calls it the tunnel view.

00:08:51: Is that a GPS thing?

00:08:53: It is.

00:08:53: In a dense city with skyscrapers, GPS signals bounce off buildings.

00:08:57: It's called the urban canyon effect.

00:08:59: So you might park your scooter perfectly in the designated zone.

00:09:03: But the GPS drift makes the system think you're a block away.

00:09:06: So the app says you can't park here.

00:09:08: And so the user gets frustrated and just leaves it wherever.

00:09:11: Exactly.

00:09:12: Broughton argues we can't just blame the operators.

00:09:14: We need infrastructure solutions like sensors or beacons that can verify compliant parking without relying on GPS.

00:09:21: Or you can solve it with design.

00:09:23: Hannah Dosanto showed off some corrals in Raleigh that looked really cool.

00:09:27: This is such a smart low-tech solution.

00:09:29: Instead of just painting a box on the asphalt, the commissioned artist to design the parking corrals.

00:09:34: So it turns street clutter into street art.

00:09:36: And it builds community acceptance.

00:09:38: If the neighbors think the parking spot looks beautiful, they stop complaining about the scooters.

00:09:43: It's a psychological win.

00:09:45: But on the regulatory side, we're still kind of stuck with these arbitrary speed limits, right?

00:09:49: Mostly, yes.

00:09:50: But Rodrigo Ateran Zapata made a really sophisticated argument to change that.

00:09:55: He thinks we should stop regulating based on speed caps and start regulating based on kinetic energy.

00:10:02: Okay, time for a physics lesson.

00:10:04: Why does that matter?

00:10:05: Well, think about it.

00:10:06: A heavy cargo e-bike loaded with groceries moving at twenty kilometers per hour, that packs a lot of punch if it hits something.

00:10:14: A lightweight scooter moving at the same speed has much less energy.

00:10:18: Right.

00:10:19: If you regulate by kinetic energy, you create a framework that accounts for the weight and the speed.

00:10:25: It's a much more nuanced safety policy than just saying, everything must go this slow.

00:10:29: It's about the potential for damage, not just the velocity.

00:10:32: Exactly.

00:10:33: And while the regulators catch up, the business side is making big moves.

00:10:36: Horace Didu reported a major acquisition.

00:10:39: Who is that?

00:10:39: Decathlon Pulse bought a majority stake in re-bike mobility.

00:10:43: Decathlon.

00:10:44: the huge sports retailer.

00:10:46: The very same.

00:10:47: They are moving heavily into the refurbished e-bike market.

00:10:51: And this is huge because it signals that the second life market is becoming big business.

00:10:56: It lowers the price point for people who can't afford a brand new three thousand euro e-bike.

00:11:01: It's

00:11:02: democratization through refurbishment.

00:11:04: And that brings us to the final point on this theme.

00:11:07: Pinar Pinzuti had a bit of a call to action for all these companies.

00:11:10: She did.

00:11:11: She noted that the tourism industry, logistics companies, manufacturers, they all benefit massively from cycling infrastructure.

00:11:18: But they don't pay for it.

00:11:19: They rarely pay for the advocacy to get that infrastructure built.

00:11:22: It's the classic free rider problem.

00:11:25: She's arguing that marketing budgets need to shift toward advocacy.

00:11:29: You can't sell bikes if people are too scared to ride on the street.

00:11:32: You have to build the lane to build the market.

00:11:34: That's

00:11:35: it.

00:11:35: Let's zoom out a bit.

00:11:37: We've talked cars, we've talked bikes.

00:11:39: Now let's talk about the concrete.

00:11:41: that holds it all together.

00:11:42: Theme three, urban infrastructure.

00:11:45: And here we have to talk about the first mile math.

00:11:49: Lawrence Kwame Carther broke this down, and it is brutal for public transport.

00:11:53: This was the comparison between taking the train and just driving, right?

00:11:56: Yes.

00:11:57: So let's say you live in the suburbs.

00:11:59: You want to take the train to the city.

00:12:00: But parking at the train station costs, say, fifteen pounds for the day.

00:12:05: Okay.

00:12:05: Carther points out that before you even buy the train ticket, the railway has already lost.

00:12:10: Because if I have an electric car, charging it at home costs pennies.

00:12:13: So the drive is cheaper than just the parking fee at the station.

00:12:16: Exactly.

00:12:18: The sunk cost of the car in your driveway combined with high station parking fees, it just kills the value proposition of the train.

00:12:25: So

00:12:25: what's the fix?

00:12:26: Free parking?

00:12:27: No, that just encourages more driving.

00:12:30: Carther suggests the death of parking ride and the rise of scooting ride.

00:12:34: So replacing car parking with scooter hubs.

00:12:37: High-density hubs for e-bikes and scooters.

00:12:40: You dramatically increase the catchment area of the station.

00:12:43: People can scoot three or four miles to the train without needing acres of concrete for cars.

00:12:49: That

00:12:49: sounds great for the city, but what about rural areas?

00:12:52: Russell King shared some data on the UK's Rural Mobility Fund that...

00:12:57: Well, that made me wince.

00:12:58: It was shocking.

00:12:59: So they tested on-demand buses in rural areas.

00:13:03: Think Uber for buses.

00:13:05: The goal was to increase usage.

00:13:07: And did it work?

00:13:08: It did.

00:13:09: Usage went up.

00:13:10: But the cost...

00:13:11: Hit me with the numbers.

00:13:12: The average subsidy per journey was ninety-one percent.

00:13:15: The cost to run the trip was about twenty-four pounds.

00:13:19: The revenue from the ticket was about two pounds.

00:13:21: Twenty-four pounds to move one person a few miles.

00:13:24: You could almost just pay for them to take a taxi at that rate.

00:13:27: It raises a massive, uncomfortable question.

00:13:30: If we want rural connectivity, we have to accept that it is a social service.

00:13:34: Purely.

00:13:35: It is not a business.

00:13:36: Not

00:13:36: until those robotexes we talked about earlier can eliminate the driver cost.

00:13:40: Exactly.

00:13:41: But right now, the economics of rural transit are just broken.

00:13:44: Meanwhile, in the big cities, they're trying to tax the cars away.

00:13:47: Yeah.

00:13:48: Guillermo Campemore looked at New York City's congestion pricing one year later.

00:13:52: And the results are actually positive.

00:13:54: Twenty-seven million fewer vehicles.

00:13:57: Less pollution.

00:13:58: But Campemore's key insight isn't about the toll itself.

00:14:01: It's that a toll alone isn't enough.

00:14:03: You can't just charge people for driving.

00:14:05: You have to give them a valid alternative.

00:14:08: Ryan Mahoney backed that up with a look at Malta.

00:14:11: which is now what, the most congested country in Europe?

00:14:13: It's a cautionary tale.

00:14:15: Malta just keeps building more road capacity, wider roads, more lanes, and what happens?

00:14:20: Produce demand, more people drive.

00:14:22: Mahoney uses Malta to prove that you cannot build your way out of congestion with asphalt.

00:14:27: You need a multimodal strategy, or you just get wider traffic jams.

00:14:31: Speaking of strategies, Algiona Melnick highlighted Toyota's Woven City.

00:14:36: This feels like the complete opposite of Malta.

00:14:38: It's the ultimate laboratory.

00:14:39: It's at the base of Mount Fuji, a living city where residents co-create their lives with autonomous logistics, hydrogen power, and pedestrian-first streets.

00:14:48: It's where we find out if all these buzzwords can actually function as a cohesive society.

00:14:53: We'll see.

00:14:54: I'd love to visit.

00:14:55: But let's bring it back to the daily grind.

00:14:58: Theme four, corporate fleets.

00:15:00: Because for a lot of our listeners, their mobility choice is whatever their HR department puts in their contract.

00:15:06: And that contract is changing.

00:15:08: Nicholas Fristrat gave a very grounded reality check on mobility budgets.

00:15:13: This is the idea that instead of a company car, you get a bucket of cash to spend on trains and Ubers.

00:15:19: Right.

00:15:20: It's very trendy.

00:15:21: But Fristrat says, careful, it's not a silver bullet.

00:15:25: If you have a sales rep covering a rural territory, remember that twenty four pound bus ride.

00:15:31: Yeah.

00:15:31: A mobility budget is going to be a nightmare for them.

00:15:34: It could be an HR disaster.

00:15:36: He argues that mobility budgets should complement the company car, not necessarily replace it.

00:15:41: George

00:15:42: Spigg calls this the and-and approach.

00:15:44: Exactly.

00:15:44: It's not car versus train.

00:15:46: It's electric car and train.

00:15:48: Companies need to electrify their fleets, yes, but they also need to offer flexible alternatives for when the car isn't the best tool.

00:15:54: But

00:15:54: cost is still king.

00:15:56: Tomea Pesti noted that in markets like Hungary, companies are really feeling the squeeze.

00:16:01: Inflation and margin pressure are real.

00:16:03: She notes that companies are getting creative with financing, choosing between euros and forens to leverage interest rates.

00:16:09: It shows that fleet management is becoming as much about forex trading as it is about cars.

00:16:14: But you can also save money by just getting people to bike.

00:16:18: Gerben A-Line at Thales shared a pretty cool story about gamification.

00:16:22: The trapper system.

00:16:24: This is brilliant.

00:16:25: Thales basically gamified the commute.

00:16:27: If you cycle to work, you earn points.

00:16:29: you get perks.

00:16:30: And it worked.

00:16:31: It worked.

00:16:31: It proves that people respond to incentives.

00:16:34: If you make cycling tangibly rewarding, not just good for the planet, but good for my wallet, employees will shift their behavior.

00:16:42: And finally, for those who do still drive, Diane Collish from Eden Red dropped a stat that sort of ends the whole range anxiety debate.

00:16:51: Ninety

00:16:51: eight percent.

00:16:51: That's the number.

00:16:52: Eden Red's charging network now covers ninety eight percent of public chargers in Europe.

00:16:57: So

00:16:57: if you have their fleet card, you can plug in Basically, anywhere.

00:17:00: Anywhere.

00:17:01: The infrastructure argument is dying, the chargers are there, the payment systems are integrated.

00:17:07: At this point, if a fleet isn't electrifying, it's a choice, not a constraint.

00:17:11: So bringing this all together, we've got robo-taxis losing their safety drivers in Austin, but facing the ethical music in London.

00:17:18: We've got scooters fighting for parking space while rural buses fight for any funding at all.

00:17:24: What's the golden thread here?

00:17:25: The thread is that the tech part is, well, It's mostly done.

00:17:30: The system part is just beginning.

00:17:32: The challenge for twenty twenty six isn't inventing a new sensor.

00:17:36: It's integrating that sensor into a messy human city.

00:17:40: It's about making the math work between the train station and the driveway.

00:17:43: It's about the connections, exactly.

00:17:45: And I'll leave you with this thought.

00:17:46: We talked about the trolley problem as a coding issue, but city planning is just a giant trolley problem.

00:17:52: Every time we allocate street space to a parking spot, a bike lane, or a robotaxi drop-off zone, we're deciding who matters.

00:17:58: We're deciding who gets moved safely and who has to wait.

00:18:01: As these technologies scale, those decisions are getting baked into the concrete.

00:18:05: We need to make sure we like the result.

00:18:07: A powerful thought to chew on.

00:18:09: If you enjoyed this deep bribe, new additions drop every two weeks.

00:18:12: Also check out our other series on electrification and battery technology, next-gen vehicle intelligence and commercial fleet insights.

00:18:19: Thanks for listening and don't forget to subscribe for the next deep dive.