Best of LinkedIn: Future Mobility & Market Evolution CW 11/ 12

00:00:00: brought to you by Thomas Allgeier and Frennus.

00:00:02: This edition highlights key LinkedIn posts on future mobility in market evolution, in weeks eleven and twelve.

00:00:08: Frenness supports enterprises with market-and competitive intelligence decoding disruptive technologies customer needs regulatory change And competitive moves.

00:00:17: so product teams and strategy leaders don't just react but shape the future of mobility

00:00:22: right?

00:00:22: So I want you imagine being a city emergency dispatcher during like a massive power blackout.

00:00:30: The grid goes down, the traffic lights are totally dark and you were frantically trying to clear the streets for emergency vehicles.

00:00:37: It's incredibly stressful.

00:00:38: Oh it gets worse because instead of actually routing fire trucks You're stuck on hold with a corporate customer service hotline For uh fifty-three minutes.

00:00:47: oh wow yeah fifty three minutes just trying To get a fleet Of frozen completely empty rogo taxes to move out of the way.

00:00:52: And the crazy thing is that Is not A hypothetical scenario?

00:00:55: No its Not.

00:00:56: That actually happened recently in San Francisco and I mean it perfectly encapsulates the tension we are seeing right now across the entire mobility landscape.

00:01:06: We're you know, pushing this brilliant technology into chaotic physical city streets And integration is where things get incredibly messy

00:01:14: which exactly what were unpacking.

00:01:17: We've spent the last two weeks sifting through all of noise, debates and hard operational data shared by professionals across LinkedIn during calendar week eleven and twelve.

00:01:30: top future mobility trends.

00:01:31: Exactly, so if you are a product team or strategy leader You probably already know the headlines.

00:01:37: our mission today is to break down The mechanisms behind those headlines.

00:01:41: we're looking at how autonomous video scaling the ruthless new economics of shared Mobility and physical urban street design Are basically all colliding?

00:01:50: To reshape our infrastructure.

00:01:51: And that collision really starts at the macro level.

00:01:53: I mean If we look at the autonomous vehicle space right now the narrative has violently shifted away from the whole cute pilot program phase.

00:02:01: Yeah,

00:02:01: right the beta testing is over.

00:02:03: yeah

00:02:03: The industry's no longer talking about whether a car can navigate a closed track?

00:02:07: Yeah...the absolute obsession Right now is commercial deployment and launch discipline..right

00:02:11: the focus is squarely on the business model.

00:02:13: hmm And you really can't talk about the Business Model of AVs right Now without Talking About Uber.

00:02:19: Absolutely

00:02:20: Jason Saltzman put together this fascinating analysis on LinkedIn recently.

00:02:24: He pointed out that Uber is aggressively positioning itself as the ultimate aggregation layer for robo taxis,

00:02:30: which is a huge shift from trying to build the tech themselves

00:02:34: exactly.

00:02:35: they aren't placing a narrow bet On one single autonomy provider They're partnering with.

00:02:40: like nearly everyone wave Zeus by to Apollo will Wabi we are ride.

00:02:46: The strategic logic there is brilliant if you really break it down.

00:02:49: I mean, building autonomous driving software... ...is just a massive capital-intensive grind.

00:02:53: Oh totally!

00:02:54: A bottomless money

00:02:55: pit.

00:02:55: Right?

00:02:56: Uber doesn't want to burn billions solving the edge cases of computer vision.

00:03:00: They wanna own the high margin platform where those vehicles get deployed, routed and financed Because the Autonomous Vehicle companies desperately need distribution right?

00:03:10: They need riders.

00:03:11: Yeah Uber already has the riders.

00:03:13: So by sitting in the middle Uber becomes this indispensable operating system for urban demand.

00:03:19: It's like they're trying to build the ultimate universal remote while the TV itself is still being invented,

00:03:24: that is a perfect way to put it.

00:03:25: and

00:03:25: I want to zoom in on how they are deploying capital to secure that position because both Natalie Lung and Dan Bergar highlighted this massive landscape.

00:03:33: altering deal billion dollars in Torivian.

00:03:39: Massive,

00:03:40: right?

00:03:41: The target is to deploy up to fifty thousand fully autonomous robotexes globally by twenty thirty one and they're starting with exclusive offerings on the uber app in san francisco and miami In twenty twenty

00:03:52: eight.

00:03:52: but the structure of that capital Is really what stands out.

00:03:55: as burger noted this is not you know zero interest rate era blank check based On a flashy rendering.

00:04:00: those days are gone

00:04:01: long gone.

00:04:02: the investment is heavily milestone-based.

00:04:04: It's tied to real performance metrics an operational accountability because Rivian is bringing the vertically integrated stack to the table.

00:04:11: Meaning they aren't just bolting third-party LiDAR sensors onto an existing chassis.

00:04:16: Exactly, They are engineering the physical vehicle The compute hardware and software as one cohesive brain.

00:04:24: That level of vertical integration Is critical for the reliability you need when running a fleet Of fifty thousand vehicles.

00:04:30: twenty forty seven

00:04:32: Okay, wait.

00:04:32: Let's pause on that fifty thousand vehicle number for a second.

00:04:34: sure because deploying massive fleets sounds incredible in a boardroom pitch deck.

00:04:39: But I mean putting a robot on a chaotic city street isn't just a routing algorithm It's a massive operational disruption.

00:04:47: Oh definitely.

00:04:48: so our cities actually ready for this volume Mm-hmm Because the friction is already highly visible.

00:04:53: i mean going back to that blackout scenario mentioned at start.

00:04:56: The Friction Is Severe.

00:04:58: Philip Koopman recently amplified this phenomenal piece of investigative reporting by Rebecca Hiawile.

00:05:03: She looked under the hood of Waymo's Real World Impact in San Francisco and details expose a major architectural vulnerability on how these fleets operate.

00:05:12: What kind of vulnerability?

00:05:13: Well, during that recent power blackout waymo vehicles were involved over fifteen hundred stoppage events.

00:05:20: Wait!

00:05:21: Fifteen Hundred Stoppages While The City is actively trying to manage grid failure.

00:05:27: Yes.

00:05:27: That fifty three minute whole time for the city's emergency staffer totally makes sense.

00:05:32: now it exposes a massive operational flaw.

00:05:35: These vehicles aren't truly autonomous when things go wrong, are they?

00:05:39: Not at all.

00:05:39: They rely heavily on cellular networks to ping remote human operators for help... ...when they encounter a scenario that you just don't understand.

00:05:47: So if blackout kills the cell towers

00:05:49: Of course network is just saturated.

00:05:51: The

00:05:51: cars are literally paralyzed in middle of intersection

00:05:53: Exactly And that dependency is what Coopman highlights.

00:05:56: Robotaxis impose unique burden on city that human drivers simply do not.

00:06:00: A confused driver will eventually you know, pull over or inch out of the way.

00:06:05: Right

00:06:05: it disconnected.

00:06:05: RoboTaxi just drops anchor

00:06:07: Drops anchor and waits.

00:06:09: And beyond the emergency response issues we really have to consider The basic geometry of the streets.

00:06:16: David Zipper wrote a stark warning about the everyday scaling Of these fleets.

00:06:20: He points that autonomous vehicles are likely To cause crippling road congestion simply because of deadheading.

00:06:26: Just to clarify Deadheading being miles driven entirely empty Precisely

00:06:31: The vehicle has to drive empty.

00:06:32: To reach the next pickup or it has to Drive across town, define a charging depot.

00:06:37: zipper points out that in the Bay Area nearly half of Waymo's miles driven have been empty.

00:06:43: That's insane.

00:06:44: Right, so when you combine the induced demand of people taking more car trips because an autonomous ride is easy and private with a massive increase in empty vehicles roaming the streets You get a geometric nightmare.

00:06:55: So what's the solution?

00:06:57: Well

00:06:57: zipper argues that unless cities immediately implement aggressive road pricing or congestion charging Scaling these fleets will just bring traffic to a total standstill.

00:07:06: So we have this profound tension.

00:07:09: The capital is flowing, the routing layers are being built but the physical city infrastructure and emergency systems are basically buckling under the weight of these early deployments which is why Mayim Rafarek's recent insights on Aika Evans-the CEO of Zooks—are so incredibly relevant right now.

00:07:27: Evans looked at this landscape and chose a completely different paradigm.

00:07:31: It's a fascinating counter approach to the whole Silicon Valley mantra move fast and break things.

00:07:37: Exactly, because while competitors were rushing retrofitted sedans to market just-to-appease investors Evans took over at Zooks and made the radical decision to slow down

00:07:47: The very unpopular move at that time.

00:07:48: Oh

00:07:49: highly unpopular.

00:07:50: But Mufarek pointed out that Zook's decided to build a safety critical purpose built vehicle from scratch No steering wheel bi directional driving four-wheel steering.

00:08:00: Evans essentially told the market, look this is going to take significantly longer but we have to get the fundamental physics and safety right before we

00:08:06: scale.".

00:08:07: And that patience really seems to be paying off now.

00:08:10: Uber CEO Dharakos Rashahi recently confirmed that Zooks is launching its purpose built robotaxi on The Uber app in Vegas this summer.

00:08:18: It totally validates the slower integrated approach

00:08:21: it does.

00:08:22: Harry Campbell did a great summary of the San Francisco landscape.

00:08:29: He notes that Waymo is currently the polished gold standard.

00:08:32: I mean, expensive to run but it functions.

00:08:34: Yeah Tesla's full self-driving remains a budget friendly experiment That still feels like an evolving beta test requiring human supervision.

00:08:41: right and zoos represents The purpose built future arriving later But designed from the ground up for the actual physics of a robo taxi service.

00:08:50: Okay, so AVs are struggling with the macro-level chaos of city routing and deadheading.

00:08:55: But if we zoom in on the micro scale like the final mile of The Journey... We're actually seeing operators solve this integration puzzle!

00:09:03: And surprisingly it's happening a sector that used to be absolute poster child for urban chaos.

00:09:08: shared micromobility

00:09:10: The shift in the shared scooter and e-bike industry over the last few years have been absolutely staggering.

00:09:16: If you look back to, say, twenty eighteen or twenty nineteen it was purely a subsidy fueled land grab.

00:09:22: Oh!

00:09:22: It's wild west.

00:09:23: Totally.

00:09:24: Companies were just flooding the streets with cheap hardware Just to establish visual footprint Burning through venture capital With terrible unit economics.

00:09:31: Yeah But that era is officially dead.

00:09:34: It is entirely about operational discipline now.

00:09:37: Kirsten Heineke and Darius Skirtu recently shared some hard data from the McKinsey Center for Future Mobility that really proves this out.

00:09:45: Six of the top ten shared e-scooter operators in Europe have actually reached profitability

00:09:54: Heading profitability in a capital-intensive hardware business operating in public spaces.

00:09:59: It means the winners are no longer the ones scaling recklessly, The winners of those who redesign their operations for lean

00:10:04: margins.".

00:10:05: And there is no better example than that story Lars Christian Grütte Molson shared about an Norwegian operator called Ride Technology.

00:10:12: Oh this is great!

00:10:14: So back in twenty nineteen Ride launched several cities without seeking formal permission.

00:10:18: first The entire industry, Lars included labeled them as robe cowboys who were just going to ruin it for everyone else.

00:10:25: But he openly admitted on LinkedIn that the industry completely misjudged them.

00:10:29: Completely misjudge because while the heavily funded multinational operators were burning massive amounts of equity on bloated corporate headquarters and giant central warehouses, Ride's founders built this hyper lean operation right when major cities tried to block them.

00:10:44: ride didn't just burn cash on lobbying they expanded into smaller overlooked tier two cities with much better margins.

00:10:52: And when municipalities actually took some to court?

00:10:55: Ride won all four lawsuits because they had meticulously read the local transportation laws and proved that they were operating within them.

00:11:02: What competitors dismissed as reckless expansion was, in reality, incredibly strict financial-and legal

00:11:08: discipline.".

00:11:09: Today there are the largest operator.

00:11:13: How do these operators solve the ongoing tension with city regulators?

00:11:30: Because a highly profitable e-scooter that is tripped over by a pedestrian or blocking a wheelchair ramp, Is still...a massive political liability for a mayor.

00:11:39: That's the core friction!

00:11:40: You can have best margins in world but if your hardware is cluttering sidewalk The City will just revoke your license like we saw in Paris.

00:11:48: Exactly.

00:11:49: Which brings us to Thomas Broughton's analysis.

00:11:51: He argues that scaling micromobility today is no longer about scaling fleet size.

00:11:56: It's fundamentally about scaling verifiable trust.

00:11:59: Verifiable Trust, I like.

00:12:01: Yes, cities need absolute technical confidence that parking rules are being respected.

00:12:06: It's not enough to ask users nicely to park well operators or having to deploy high accuracy dual-band GPS and computer vision on the edge basically making it physically impossible for a user to end their ride unless The vehicle is securely within a digitally geofenced rack.

00:12:22: Frederick Helm the CEO of Voi echoed this operational maturity perfectly.

00:12:27: Voj just announced a two hundred and fifty million Swedish Krona investment in Stockholm.

00:12:32: that's huge commitment

00:12:34: it is, his message to the public was very clear.

00:12:36: they are not going flood streets like its twenty nineteen.

00:12:39: industry has grown up.

00:12:40: This new capital is heavily focused on enforcing designated parking zones and expanding service into the suburban outskirts, rather than just dumping thousands of vehicles onto a highly profitable but highly congested city center.

00:12:53: And when operators take that disciplined approach to integration these services transition from being like tourist novelties to becoming critical municipal infrastructure.

00:13:02: Yeah, Aaron Priest highlighted some fascinating behavioral data.

00:13:05: during the recent public transit strikes in Germany when The primary rail and bus networks went offline Shared mobility rides of the affected cities spiked by up to two hundred percent.

00:13:15: Wow

00:13:16: a Two hundred percent surge proves these aren't toys anymore.

00:13:19: People are fundamentally relying on these fleets to keep the local economy moving When traditional systems fail.

00:13:25: however As Nils Fernley's research points out, if we want shared mobility to seamlessly complement public transport every single day not just during a strike.

00:13:35: We have to solve the friction of ferry integration right?

00:13:38: He analyzed Norwegian transit data and found that roughly one in five e-scooter trips are already part of a multimodal journey usually connecting to train or bus but now users penalize for behavior because they're paying twice They pay the scooter unlock fee, and then they pay the train fare.

00:13:56: That's incredibly frustrating for the user!

00:13:58: It is.

00:13:59: Fernley argues that digital fare integration allowing one ticket to unlock the entire journey Is The single biggest lever.

00:14:05: cities have To increase combined use And reduce private car dependency.

00:14:09: Okay so Digital fare integration solves the payment friction.

00:14:14: But true multimodal travel requires more than just linked software.

00:14:18: it Requires a physical spatial solution.

00:14:21: You have to actually place the scooters, the ride-hale pickup zones and train platforms in a geometry that makes sense for human beings.

00:14:28: Absolutely!

00:14:29: Which brings us into our third major theme from The Sources – urban mobility & challenge of physical systems design.

00:14:37: This

00:14:37: is where digital promises finally hit concrete.

00:14:41: The Bukhastanya and Baramse used both highlighted a crucial shift in the industry conversation.

00:14:46: We are moving away from obsessing over standalone digital apps, And focusing heavily on physical infrastructure... ...the Mobility Hub is rapidly becoming the physical backbone of modern city.

00:14:55: It's like finally untangling massive knot extension cords and plugging everything into one beautifully organized power strip.

00:15:01: That

00:15:02: exactly what it is.

00:15:04: Think of a mobility hub less like a traditional parking lot and more like an airport terminal for the neighborhood.

00:15:09: You don't just dump airplanes on a tarmac until passengers to figure it out, you design dedicated gates logical walkways and baggage claims so different modes of transport can safely hand off passengers to one another without colliding right?

00:15:22: A Mobility Hub does that for The Street Level bringing heavy transit shared micro-mobility EV charging in pedestrian spaces into one deliberate organized spatial network.

00:15:32: because cities are finally treating the curb space as a systems design challenge, rather than just free storage for private metal.

00:15:40: If you do not actively design the interchange space for these different modes to interact, you default to

00:15:45: chaos.".

00:15:46: But I have to play devil's advocate here against this beautiful vision of perfectly organized hubs and pristine bike lanes.

00:15:54: We can design the most gorgeous efficient mobility terminals in.

00:15:58: But what happens to that infrastructure when the massive invisible force of e-commerce logistics completely ignores it?

00:16:04: Ah,

00:16:05: yes.

00:16:05: The classic just for a minute delivery van problem.

00:16:07: Yes Juan Moritriana wrote a brilliant highly frustrating post about this exact spatial conflict.

00:16:14: He pointed out that cities will spend millions designing beautiful protected bike lanes and then a massive Delivery Van just parked straight across it for ten minutes.

00:16:23: And the driver always says I'll just be in

00:16:25: every single time.

00:16:27: Triana's point is that we are stubbornly designing twentieth century streets for twenty-first century logistics.

00:16:34: City planners often pretend e-commerce volume doesn't exist so they don't zone for adequate commercial loading bays.

00:16:40: And because the infrastructure does not match economic reality, logistics are forced to happen in a bike lane or blocking crosswalks and double parked transit lanes.

00:16:49: It's

00:16:50: unavoidable!

00:16:50: It is!

00:16:51: Triana argues forcefully that if we want walkable safe cities We have start designing last meter boxes.

00:16:59: A bike lane is useless if poor zoning turns it into a VIP parking spot for delivery drivers.

00:17:04: That isn't just bad driving behavior, It's the fundamental failure of spatial planning.

00:17:08: And when Spatial Planning fails at that level The consequences aren't just annoying They are lethal.

00:17:15: Which brings us to the ultimate metric Of urban mobility that underpins all these discussions

00:17:20: Safety.

00:17:21: Yeah, this is the most critical part.

00:17:22: as we try to integrate heavy fast-moving delivery vans Autonomous vehicles and shared scooters into the same physical space as pedestrians The stakes are literal life and death

00:17:33: And safety is rightfully moving to the absolute center of the mobility narrative.

00:17:38: Russell King pointed out that London's new vision zero action plan Is now explicitly targeting the growing danger of oversized SUVs?

00:17:46: Hmm...the data he shared his sobering.

00:17:49: SUVs are two hundred and nine percent more likely to kill a child under nine years old compared to his standard passenger car.

00:17:55: Wait,

00:17:55: two-hundred and nine per cent that is a staggering fatality multiplier?

00:17:58: It's

00:17:58: horrifying!

00:17:59: And yet there was massive blind spot in how global safety agencies actually measure this danger.

00:18:05: Sarah Stase pointed out critical metric missing from almost all major road safety reports.

00:18:10: Vehicle bonnet or hood height.

00:18:12: Her research shows that for every ten centimeter increase in a vehicle's front end hood height, the pedestrian fatality risk jumps by up to twenty-two percent.

00:18:21: The physics behind it are grim but really important.

00:18:25: understand... A lower vehicle strikes a pedestrian and legs typically throwing them onto the hood where they impact is somewhat distributed.

00:18:33: But a vehicle with massive vertical frontend Strikes a pedestrian directly into vital organs or head And forward momentum pulls the victim under the wheels rather than pushing them up.

00:18:44: And Stace notes that Australia's top-selling vehicle today has a hood that is forty five centimeters higher than the top seller just a decade ago.

00:18:52: Forty

00:18:52: Five centimeters?

00:18:53: Yeah,

00:18:53: That geometry alone makes it nearly one hundred and forty five percent more deadly for anyone outside of the vehicle.

00:18:59: yet almost no road safety agencies systematically report front end height in their crash statistics or use to regulate urban access.

00:19:07: We simply cannot manage a safety crisis that we refuse to measure.

00:19:10: No, we can't.

00:19:11: if you want to shape the future of mobility?

00:19:13: We have to design our physical space and Our vehicle regulations for human safety not just vehicle throughput.

00:19:19: I mean If we synthesize these three pillars The shift toward disciplined integrated rollout four autonomous vehicles the pivot from raw growth to verifiable compliance and profitability in shared mobility, and the urgent need to redesign our physical curves.

00:19:36: And measure that true physics of vehicle safety you get a very clear picture of the industry's next decade.

00:19:43: The hyper growth experimental phase is over.

00:19:46: we are firmly in the complex integration face

00:19:49: on that integration phases going to trigger second order effects that could completely rewrite urban economics

00:19:54: which leads us with building directly on a concept raised by Shaquille Adley in the sources.

00:20:01: We talked about robo-taxi scaling up to the point of causing deadhead and congestion, right?

00:20:05: Yeah!

00:20:06: And we talk about cities reclaiming physical space for mobility hubs... Well if autonomous vehicles eventually reach a scale where they constantly circulate to pick up passengers or retreat to cheap charging depots outside city limits… They will rarely ever need to park downtown.

00:20:20: Oh wow I see where you're going with this.

00:20:22: Right.

00:20:23: so What happens to the millions of square feet of premium concrete currently tied up in city center parking garages?

00:20:30: Does curbside drop-off space become the most valuable real estate in this City, while massive parking structures become completely obsolete.

00:20:38: That's incredible to think

00:20:39: about!

00:20:40: We might be watching a mobility revolution that quietly triggers the biggest urban real estate transformation in a century.

00:20:47: It starts with how we move but it ultimately ends with how it dilled.

00:20:51: If you enjoyed this episode, new episodes drop every two weeks!

00:20:54: Also check out our other editions on electrification and battery technology next-gen vehicle intelligence and commercial fleet insights.

00:21:02: Thank You so much for joining us on This Deep Dive.

00:21:04: Don't forget to hit subscribe.

00:21:05: So never miss an update And keep shaping the future of mobility.

00:21:08: We'll see ya next time.