Drive & Journey Reborn: A Realistic Look At The Future of Cars and Transport
A few years ago in college, I decided to start writing about my thoughts on the automotive industry, having zero experience and just an undying loyalty to the vehicles that I loved. If interested, this blog is still up, and I’m still fond of the name — Drive&Journey.
The ‘About’ section screams collegiate idealist/gear head, with a particularly noble cause:
The plan is to cover stories and topics that are relevant to the industry, while not forgetting that part of what makes cars so vital to us is not just the strictly logistical necessity, but the tangible, familial attachment that comes with driving one… I intend to explore how and in what ways our relationships with these machines are changing through framing content within the relevant technology, business, and societal context.
Since those initial days where I was more trying to justify cars’ existence and its importance in society, I’ve had several professional and personal experiences that have altered my thinking. While I still believe the vehicle in some sense to be a pivotal piece of the transportation puzzle, there is a much broader dialogue that I allude to but never tried to tackle before.
This broader dialogue is not the stale “shared electric autonomous vehicles will change the world” argument, or every car company trying to sell the “we’re a mobility company” head-fake, or every tech company trying to sell the “we’re smarter than the car companies” arrogance. I could sew my head to the carpet for the amount of conferences I’ve seen and/or been to where the solution in everyone’s presentation is “we need to partner together to create value” or “we need the government to catch up to the industry because the tech is already there.”
The truth from my vantage point is that the automotive and greater transportation industry lack a real and practical vision. By real and practical I don’t mean less transformative, I just mean there’s actually a next step, not some theoretical point in time where the stars align, the tech is flawless, and everyone magically “partners to create value”.
Why do we lack such a vision? I believe it’s because the tech companies who started using the ‘D’ word back in the early 2010s with autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles threw the OEMs into a paralyzing panic, and ever since then the tech companies have been in control of the narrative. And rightly so. No OEM would be where they are today on a number of different tech and energy fronts if it weren’t for the tech guys constructing that burning platform.
Unfortunately though, it appears that the tech guys don’t have a real plan for where the future of transportation goes past Uber and Waymo. In their world, scalability equals success, and their KPI is millions to billions of users/subscribers. The marginal cost of acquisition of new customers is basically just the cost of marketing to them. So it would seem only appropriate that when the tech guys started looking at transportation, they gravitated to the most light-weight, ‘scalable’ ideas first. Uber and Google X were first on the scene, with Uber being literally an app to replace taxis, and Google, with billions in cash lying around, trying to build full-scale autonomous vehicles with proprietary software and hardware.
Not much has changed since. There have been 1,001 startups building the hardware and software pieces for autonomous vehicles based on mostly Google’s original thoughts on what an autonomous vehicle would need, and 10,001 Uber look-a-likes. Google’s decided that building cars is too much effort, and has resorted to piloting their hardware on Chryslers in Arizona where the local populace continues to treat them…poorly. Uber has a nicer CEO, but ironically hasn’t made money yet despite global scale, and actually has been found to contribute to traffic congestion rather than alleviate it.
This whole highly-publicized drama at the top of the D-for-Disruption chain has left the OEMs and other transport companies in one of two camps: one where the people who buried their heads in the sand back in 2013 are starting to breath a false sigh of relief, and the other where they’ve spent considerable capital to chase the tech guys’ narrative, only to discover that both they and the tech guys are turning up next to empty on a clear roadmap to returns.
In other words, we’re stuck. The narrative has no clear line of sight forward, and no one seems positioned yet to take up the mantle. The only thing that I think can be said about the future roadmap for transportation is that it’s messy and not at all scalable in the Silicon Valley sense. It requires deep local connections to government and communities, and a path for all (or most)existing stakeholders to play in the new game.
In this next version of my blog, I’ll try to get at instances and ideas that have the potential to push the narrative forward in real and feasible ways. And in between these, please beg forgiveness for the occasional oogling and oggling over the new and shiny.
