This week Horace and Oliver were together in person for the first time in nearly two and a half years as they got ready for the Micromobility Europe conference. One of the things that they love to do every so often is to revisit the Micromobilty thesis.
They want this to be the episode you share with everyone who is perhaps interested in what all the fuss is about. If you’re a first time listener, Horace Dediu is the creator of the term Micromobility, and this podcast was where he and Oliver first started talking about it.
They’ve now done over 140 episodes, covering all manner of lightweight electric vehicles including interviewing CEOS/founders in this space from companies like Vanmoof, Cowboy, Onewheel, Unagi, Segway, Arcimoto and more, while also talking to shared operators such as Tier, Lime, Bird, Dott, Revel and Beam.
They try to focus on the intersection between the new vehicle tech, cities and consumers, using the disruptive innovation framework developed by Clay Christensen to ask what jobs are being solved, why these small and low cost vehicles are interesting, and what the implications will be on wider society.
Specifically they tackle:
- Where the insight for micromobility came from
- The core tenets of what it is - electric, lightweight, utility
- Why it matters including how the world is urbanising, how we need to radically reduce emissions per vehicle, how most trips are short trips and how small vehicles evolve faster than small vehicles etc.
- Why it is significant to transport systems in terms of enabling point to point transport in dense urban areas
- What we got wrong in the last four years
