Ride AI

In this episode, we define the term micromobility and what is/isn’t in the categorization. We run through: 1) Why micromobility can be defined as utility focussed urban transport in sub 500kg vehicles, and predominantly electrically powered. 2) The background of how Horace came to see micromobility’s potential to disrupt the automobile industry. 3) Why e-bikes are some of the best city-based transportation mode option- hint: it’s the fastest way across town and can be parked anywhere. 4) How to think about the categorization of different types of micromobility devices, and why that matters. 5) How the development of micromobility is paralleling the development of personal computing and why we’re still in 1976. 6) Why car obesity has provided ripe opportunity to develop micromobility options in the marketplace. 7) The key difference between invention and innovation and how this applies to micromobility. Bonus! Why Horace thinks that riding an electric bike is more thrilling than driving a Porsche. Transcript of this show is available on our show page.

In this inaugural episode, we outline the key themes and issues we want to address in the show series including: 1) Defining micromobility - what is it, where did it come from and why does it matter? 2) The disruptive potential of micromobility. With this, we will unpack why the current fixation on autonomy with automobiles is misplaced, and what a distributed, connected robot of micromobility vehicles might look like. 3) The great unbundling of the car - what does it mean, and why the micromobility was required to make multimodality a feasible unbundled option for travel. 4) How the emergence of micro mobility tracks the development of the early days of computing, and why we’re still really in 1976 with the emergence of the Apple I. 5) How disruption from the low end induces demand and drives such steep adoption curves. We also unpack why their scale will permit the development of large scale computation platforms, especially vs. traditional car platforms. 6) The impact of the emergence of micromobility on infrastructure and how cities function. 7) How the business models of this might emerge, how securitisation of the assets deployed will enable rapid deployment, and lay the foundations for tokenised solutions that align the interests of users, operators and investors together. We also hit Marchetti’s constant (time budgets for travel) and log normal distributions of travel time. We end on a thought experiment on how teleportation would change everything.