Autofleet’s Path to Worldwide Sustainable Mobility
Our goal at autofleet has always been to enable asset-heavy fleets to lead the way to a sustainable and profitable future of mobility services. Fleets have to play a key role in the value delivery chain of autonomous mobility, as AVs will be managed and optimized in scaled fleets. At autofleet we believe this can start today, and traditional fleets — rental, leasing, car-sharing, taxi, public transportation — can leverage their strategic advantages to optimize existing operations and activate unutilized vehicles in new mobility services.
Not only can fleets become more efficient, but mobility services can be offered profitably, by ensuring maximum utilization of existing assets. This is an essential step to power the growth and adoption of mobility as a service globally.
This mission has taken us all over the world, partnering with fleets in over 10 countries across Europe, USA, Latin America, Africa, and Asia to maximize efficiency and leverage their assets to power new services. Our fleet partners have global operations, and we’ve designed the platform to flexibly support that and quickly launch deployments wherever needed.
That experience has exposed us to incredible demand and growth in markets like Asia-Pacific.
Asia has a number of qualities that make it an ideal launchpad for fleet-based mobility services: uniquely positioned asset-heavy trading companies already active in multiple mobility-focused business lines, some of the most traffic congested cities in the world, low rates of private car ownership in developing markets, strong OEM presence leading incubation of new ideas and business models, and mega cities with recognized potential for mobility innovation.
When we met ABeam Consulting (a leading consulting firm headquartered in Japan, and with over 6,000 professionals serving clients throughout Asia, the Americas, and Europe), we immediately found a partner who saw the same opportunity, and also shared our commitment to doing mobility right: profitably and sustainably from the start.
For that reason we are absolutely thrilled to announce our partnership with ABeam, to support companies to launch and expand mobility services throughout APAC. With ABeam’s expertise in the region and in business transformation, we find the perfect partner to accelerate the adoption of optimized fleet-based mobility solutions.
That partnership kicks off with an important collaboration with FIGIX, a taxi dispatch service provider in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, who is leveraging the autofleet platform to support a proof of concept of a microbus ride-sharing service, providing transportation options to areas not served by bus routes.
And we’re just getting started — stay tuned for plenty more great news coming soon.
As a final thought: 2020 has given us plenty of time to reflect on the status of the mobility industry, looking back at the last decade. From 2010–2020, there was incredible growth and adoption of new mobility services, but towards the end of the decade we saw that growth came at a cost: business models with no path to profitability, increased congestion in cites, and gig-economy drivers struggling to make living wages. Recently, the tide has started to turn, and we’ve seen mobility services shut down, and cut back, and shut down. And then COVID-19 came and forced forced fleets to further reconsider how to use their assets more elastically, as the mobility demand curve shifted completely.
Heading into this new decade, it’s about time we shift the focus to find the path forward to mobility business models we can be proud of: the kind that are sustainable for operators, users, and cities.
Keep following us here to see that happen.
Want to make sustainable mobility a reality? Reach out to me at adam@autofleet.io
Read the full press release on our partnership announcement here: https://www.abeam.com/jp/en/about/news/20200916
