AAH #645 - Who Needs to Own Cars in the Age of Mobility?

I'll online after hours. It brought to you by Bridgedone Tires Solutions for your

journey. Two in a row and a row. That's right, it's gonna

be a good one. Yeah, So give the audience a sneak peek a

little preview. Well, um, we're going to have a gentleman, Dan

Sturgis, whom I've known for a long time, who's a very creative designer who has been in the mobility space since I don't know, since it existed so far as I'm concerned. And his name is Dan Sturgis, and Dan

has recently published a book and you're too far about that and joining us.

Also is is Mike Austin, who is a favorite of the show, who is with guide House Insights. Now, so, gentlemen, thank you for

joining us. And so so Dan would begin with you right away in your

book and you're to fire. You should hold it up so the audience can

see it available on Amazon. Well, you know, we'll plug that you

write in your book. There are two main approaches being taken by the multitude

of companies, government agencies, and other organizations working to develop and provide carbon free transportation. One is focused on creating electric automobiles and trucks, and the

other is focused on providing multimo mobility options such as bicycles, micromobility, public transit, and other new mobility alternatives. Unfortunately, here in the United States,

there are major problems with both these two approaches which are holding us back from the dire improvements we urgently need to make. So I want you to

unpack that for us. Dan, Yeah, well, it's it's a very

confusing thing what our future of mobility is. I think Henry Ford said,

a problem clearly stated as half solved, and in some respects my book is doing a situational analysis of where we are and why we're having some challenges, at least, in my opinion, some challenges that really getting traction, so that those two different approaches. Obviously, this show is you know, obviously

very focused on the automotive world, and you're seeing what feels like a pretty revolutionary time where these internal combustion engines, we're moving past it and it's now to pull out that engine and put in an electric motor in the batteries and all the things. But the basic vehicle is still a full sized vehicle,

the size you know of a Hona Civic today, a modern Honda Civic, that footprint is about the size of two kingsize mattresses. So it's still a

large vehicle that's mostly moving one person, you know. So I think it's

what for like, it's at least ninety percent of people driving to work or driving alone in the car. And I'm not supposed to probably do this,

but I have a picture of a vehicle that's mostly just one person. Rights

it's using a lot of extra space. And if you're it's a twenty percent

load factor. If you've got five seats and you only have one person in

those five seats, it's a twenty percent load factor. And if you're the

CEO of United Airlines or Delta, you can only fly one week at a twenty percent load factor, then you've got a business. But that's how we're

doing things. So all of the revolution of the auto industry of going into

electric automobiles is yes, making a carbon free solution, but it's not going forward in any other comprehensive way. And then obviously the other side of this,

selling your car, riding a bike, taking public transit, all of that, it's not been getting a lot of traction and I think I think there's a slide I have called thick city thin slid city that may be able to be pulled up. But I think to understand this, we have to

realize that the United States is almost like two different countries. It's like two

different planets. I mean, Manhattan is very different than where Armington Hills,

Michigan is, and the solution for mobility in Manhattan is going to be very different in the solution if we don't want to be as car dependent in density.

So in terms of what I'm saying here is we have these two different approaches and the electric automobile is not going to be the big answer because it's not going to address traffic congestion, it's not going to make transportation all that much lower price, and it's maybe not offering it's the kind of flexibility that we could get with a more on demand mobility future. And then this public

transit's struggling in the United States and ride in a bike or we hear a lot about micromobility, but micromobility of the electric scooter or whatever it's going to be. If it's a rainy day or it's cold out, you know,

you want to be inside something that's warm, like in a vehicle, like a capsule. So what's been what I'm putting in my book here is thirty

years of work or whatever is to actually shrink the car down to more of a local use car. We know that about half of our trips are only

three miles or less. And to use a car that I could drive across

the country. I mean, our cars are incredible, right, I mean

Dean came and said, our modern automobile is less propound than Hamburger me.

And it's incredible, right, But do I need a vehicle that I can drive at eighty miles an hour from LA to New York? To go two

miles? I mean, it's like drinking I'm in a restaurant. It's like

drinking soup with a shovel. It's overkill. So so I should point out

that you're a car designer. So people, people don't, you know,

think that you're just some sort of guy who's just all about bicycles and small things. I mean, you you designed. I'm a rare bird in the

mobility space because I started as a car designer. I was a complete carnet

as a kid. I had hundreds of matchbox cars. I'm not very tall.

I'm five foot six. I started driving a car when I was like

twelve or thirteen, and the neighbors would call and say that cars driving around the neighborhood. There's no one driving, and so I've been I'm a complete

car freak. I've driven Porsches on the Audubon and a one hundred fifty miles

an hour. I mean. But at the same time, at the end

of the day, I think I like people more than I like cars, and so and I think in terms of, like you go out to the water, you have like people like sailboats and like people that like motor boats.

I'm just was one of those sailboat people. I liked the elegance of

using the wind to sail rather than having some big motor and all the gasoline floating through it. So that's just kind of my orientation. But my sister

sent me the book Smallest Beautiful, I think after college, and I started looking at it. But I really got into this when I couldn't afford my

car. I bought my first car at age fifteen here in Boulder, when

I was going to high school, and it was a Fiat one twenty fourth Spider, and I bought it at fifteen and nine months old, and I was working at Denny's or something making some money, and that car had electrical problems, so I sold it. When I turned sixteen, I bought this

total piece of crap Mercury capri V six, which was in five months a total piece of crap. So I bought a scooter just to get around Boulder,

which is forty five miles an hour and all I needed. But it

had no roof and it had no carry I couldn't carry cargo on it, And I was like, why can't I get a best book of the roof?

And I could imagine going to the car dealer and saying, sell me your cheapest car, which probably would have been a Chevy Shavette back in my day, Like, sell me your Chevy Shavette with no doors and no bumpers, and the dealer would say, well, that's not safe. But then

across the street they're selling motorcycles. And I mean, there's at least five

brands of motorcycles in the United States today that can go over two or fifty miles an hour. So it's like it just made no sense. To me,

and that's where I kind of got this interest in this gap between the best boo and the smallest car. Dan, So I agree with you,

you know, with everything that you're saying there. In fact, years ago

I met Luigi Kolani, who you probably are awaring, the craziest designer I ever met in my life. Sure, but he said something very profound.

He said, you know, if you got all the Einstein's in the world together, who had never seen an automobile or it hadn't been invented yet, and you ask them to come up with a conveyance to move people around, they would never, in their wildest dreams come up with a vehicle that weighed four thousand pounds and had the power of two hundred horses. He said,

they just would not come up with that idea. But you're not the first

one to come out and say, hey, look, we don't need all these big cars. We can get by with smaller stuff. And I mean

this goes way back, whether you look at Forward with the model T Crossley, you know, with his little stuff. After the Second World War,

people just don't buy the little cars. I mean maybe they buy them in

markets, you know, developing countries where you know, cars are still beyond the reach of most people and it's super dense pack and all that stuff.

But once people get a little bit of room, elbow room and the like, and it goes beyond just cars. People buy what they want, even

if it's only going to be for once or twice a year. So how

do you change that mentality? As my question, Well, that's why I

don't have a sound bite for that. That's why there's sixty thousand words and

my two hundred forty eight my two hundred forty eight page book, which has one hundred pages of images, color images. I was actually on the phone

with our Colorado US Senator John Hickenlooper this past Sunday for twenty minutes and he's basically said a lot of what you just said, which is like, Dan, we've tried the small vehicles, people don't want him or all this kind of thing, And okay, yeah. At the same time, what I'm

proposing in this book Near to Far is that we start to look at two categories of vehicle. One that's more for local use. I'm basically saying that's

not for the highway so much. So you see tier one a light low

speed mode, so the bicycle, you know, the electric scooter or whatever.

So that's what we see in micromability. But I'm saying we need little

cars, whether more like golf carts or they're like almost like the smart car.

I mean, a smart car is something to talk about. The smart

car. The original smart car is kind of like on the fence between my

Tier one and Tier two. The Tier two are the fast heavy vehicles,

so that's our three hundred million in automobiles and light trucks that we have in this country. And then Tier three would be the airplane where we travel at

five hundred miles an hour. So the Tier one, Tier two the light,

low speed mode, fast savy vehicle. We don't really have a world

right now in the United States where we have those two categories, and the Tier one we don't have that many of those. The Tier two we have

tons of those, And in terms of integrating the smaller vehicle, there's a lot of work to do. There's a lot of issues about safety, and

I can talk about some of that on the show, and a lot of that's in my book. But think about a harbor. Let's say we go

to a harbor on the East Coast or the West coast, United States.

It's on the ocean, and these yachts are coming in from the ocean.

When you're in the harbor where you're a yacht and you now want to go across the harbor to get to the fishhouse or something, get some dinner tonight.

Do you fire up your ocean going yacht or do you get into a dinghy? You get into a little boat for the short trip. And I'm

saying it's time to split these vehicles that we use, our cars, these enclosed that we use, we mostly a lot of us love, but to split them into two categories and to prioritize the smaller category for the local use.

And they have available the bigger vehicle when you need the bigger vehicle.

Today, I don't know how many there's certain number of millions of people today that are using their phone to get their transportation on demand, probably at a shared ebike station or something. And so if we go back to your Kalani

thing, if we go back to the nineteen sixties, why we're we selling Cadillacs with eight cylinder motors. We don't need that size. Well, Americans

have always sort of wanted to have as much power as possible, and in the world before the digital age, that extra capacity. You wanted more power,

more seats, ability to do more. Okay, we needed to buy

a car that had that extra capacity in case someone needed a ride. But

now we're in the digital age. Now we're in the age of mobility as

a service. And if we as humans build out the network of services that

we need and start offering the right vehicles that are safe and people a joy, people could be using smaller vehicles and just going to a station. It

could be as common as the McDonald's and just going to a station and within a minute switching out to a different vehicle for a longer trip. So like

in your area. I lived in Birmingham, Michigan for a while. That's

like a little town. So if I had a vehicle that got me around

Birmingham, did the local trips for me. It's may be enclosed. It's

really not for the highway. But I need to go to ann Arbor right

now, there may be sort of a new transit option, or I go to what I call the far car station because there's near cars and farcars.

In my world, my future mobility world and I go to the far car station and I check out a vehicle to drive out there, Like I would have loved the vw LX one, that little high mileage car they did.

That would be a perfect vehicle to check out to go to ann Arbor for me, or to go to Grand Rapids or someplace like that. So it's

this new age of on demand mobility. It's right sizing and our car designers

for this future that I'm talking about, you know, before we get into autonomy and the deeper future, if we start develop being car sharing more like car libraries where you can check out the vehicle you want, we as car designers can start designing mission specific vehicles, vehicles that are only for one thing.

Maybe it's going to Northern Michigan and your family for the weekend, and you know, it's a vehicle it's designed just for that. And I think

that's an exciting thing that we're not just all driving around our cars that are generic. We seem to not want any with colors on them. They're all

silver, white or black. For some reason. I have some sense of

why, but it's like they're all like a Swiss army knife. They're actually

have crappy scissors, crappy knives. You know, it's just like they're trying

to do everything and in this digital age, we really don't have to keep doing that. So so Mike, you you're looking at this stuff a lot.

Why do you think that this has not happened, and what do you think the likelihood of it happening? I mean, I would I would love

for it to happen. You're seeing it happen a little bit in cities.

Paris is probably the best example where they've you know, closed off a lot of lanes to bikes. And that was actually the question I had for Dan

was you know, I when when you look at micro mobility now, one of the solutions to make it easier for people to use and more accessible for people is to have dedicated lanes. You're not you know, you're not taking

your ebike out on the road with with an F one fifty um. So

assuming that this would require some form of reshaping our roads or our transportation networks.

Another another issue we have in the US is this idea that if if you're giving something to someone, you're taking it away from someone else. So

how do you adrest that idea of you know, oh, you're going to take away lanes and then I'm not going to be able to drive when you know, regardless of what the data or previous evidence shows in terms of increased bike usage or people's overall happiness or minimal impact of traffic. But this this

general idea of when you say, you know, if you're going to say we're going to set up a lane for these small cars or something like that, you know, how do you how do you sell the people that that hannock when they hear that, well, I don't think if they are able to test test drive the new system, and that's complicated thing to able to let someone test drive sort of a new experience in a city mobility thing.

But if they're able to test drive, I think they're not going to cry about it. They're gonna actually like it. I've been at this for over

thirty five years, and I'm pretty sure I would have stayed on this path because it's not been easy if it wasn't for a different type of eco eco.

It's economics. It's like Don Runkel, a former gm VP, said,

he goes, I believe in economic gravity, the low cost solution is going to win and That's what has kind of kept me going because what I see of sort of the American house with let's say the two cars. You

know, so one of that cars shrinks into like a smaller vehicle. Could

be an e bike, could be a cargo bike, could be a golf cart, could be a neighborhood car. What Paul McCready called the subcar,

This little vehicle kind of like a smart car, but not even for the highway, just low cost, gets you on does most of your trips, eighty percentire trips. I think you have a slide for the eighty percent car.

So it's this little vehicle that gets you around locally, and then you can basically you choose another option to go far. You can choose transit,

whether it's existing public transit, hopefully something better that we can make, or it's the robotaxi, which we may talk about today, or it's what I call the far car, the car sharing. And so you can look at

the battery pack, you know, with all of the geopolitical concerns coming about these huge battery packs and our automobiles, this eighty percent car has this small battery pack and it doesn't cost much. And so if the average place of

the car now has forty eight thousand dollars, and we want to move to a carbon free world and a healthier future. We have a huge problem with

these cars costing so much. So it's the economics that get me so motivated

by this that ultimately you create a mobility bundle. Like that little lizard comes

on TV every day, the Geico Lizard, and it's like, you know the Australian accident, I'm gon save you four hundred dollars a year. Well,

I'm talking about a mobility bundle, save the consumer ten times that, like four thousand a year. And so so that's like the first part of

it. What we're talking about here is just a lot less expensive. But

then there's also there's a part about the smaller vehicle. So back to Birmingham,

Michigan. I'm driving that little vehicle around. In my book, there's

a section called local lanes where our bike lanes become bigger than they become local lanes for the e bikes and other things, or like a single seat wide neighborhood car, or the other part I call is mouseholes. So like in

Birmingham, this is not going to happen tomorrow. But you put gates around

the downtown area of Birmingham and then you cut these holes out I call mouseholes, and only the little car can go in. And so if I live

a mile from downtown Birmingham and I have a beautiful Porsche Suv could be electric eighty thousand dollars, and then I have this little rudimentary vehicle. It's fun

more open sided or soft windows, but the little vehicle can go into downtown Burmaham. The big vehicle's got to park eight blocks away. All of a

sudden, this little eight thousand dollar thing is going to take me right in front of the cafe and let me park there. I'm going to drive that.

So I think we can see a change in this behavior with the micromobility people today, they're just saying, let's all get on the bicycle, let's get on the electric bike, which is great. I love electric bikes,

but if it's cold, if it's twenty degrees, I don't love the electric bike. So why do we have to say, oh, if you want

to be warm, you have to have a car that you can drive three thousand miles across our country and use that to be warm and keep the rain off you. I mean, if they ever build a bridge between Alaska and

Russia, I can drive our cars to Italy and that's what I'm going to use to go a mile. So, so, Dan, you know lots

of people in the auto industry, in the traditional auto industry, and you've talked to all of these people, and you know, we're not seeing anybody getting on that. We're just seeing electric pickups being developed. So you know,

I mean, and if you're talking about economics, they're going to basically say, I make more money off of F one fifty lightning than I went off of one of Dan's eighty percent cars. Why would I bother? I

get it, I get it, I mean if so yeah, So, Jean Jennings has been a friend for a long time, and she introduced me to Jim Farley back in twenty ten. We both adopted a child, I

think from Guatemala, and so we had a conversation in two thousand and ten, and then I started sending us some emails and I'd be in touch with them like three or four times a year with email, and he was always nice to respond. He did once respond in detail about small vehicles, which

I'll get too. And then I've known Doug Field, for example, for

since Segue for over twenty years and watched him go to Apple and then go to Tesla into the Model three in the Model Why incredibly hard program, and now he's at Ford where I think eighteen thousand people under him. Doug actually

understand small mobility. Doug actually, you know, was part of the Segue.

He understood the efficiency that I'm talking about and all the comprehensive benefits.

Farley is a great guy, I believe, but he's either worked for Toyota or for Ford for his entire career, you know, and he's probably been put helped put two hundred million cars and trucks on the road. You I

don't think you'll understand this mobility future if you can only only work like in the leadership of Toyota and Ford. I mean you, I mean you have

to get out there, start a company with your life savings, you know, work in this. You know, you have to ride transit across the

You have to really understand this mobility future. You can't just read a McKinsey

report or a Deloitte report and all of a sudden understand it. Okay,

So so so Jim's a good guy. But yeah, you go down to

your factory and you get ten thousand dollars pure profit on one of your SUV's.

Of course you have no interest in what I'm talking about. But at

the same time, I mean, think if Henry Ford had come along and tried to build the automobile and the Horse and Buggy Company. Were these huge

companies with millions of employees, with all the political connections, I mean, they could keep any kind of disruption from coming to them. We probably would

have waited twenty years for the Model T if Henry Ford had that environment.

So I've had to like go up against these car companies. And when I

left General Motors Design, it's like this company is going to go bankrupt.

Somebody somebody. They did. They went bankrupt, but brought back into life.

You know, no questions asked. Keep making your corvettes, join me,

make a bus for us. Just come on back, here's your eighty

billion dollars. So these companies have continued to keep pushing an older idea,

you know. So these electric cars they're all coming out, they're still asking

the consumer to buy them like it's nineteen forty and Dan I agree with you, but you know, get real. The car companies are never going to

do this. They're car companies. It's like expecting the oil companies to give

us redowable energy. They're not going to do it. They're oil companies.

What you need to see your vision come about. And I think there's others

out there trying it. You need startups, you need people coming out of

left fields year to do it. And well, I think we have your

right. You're right, and I'm it's more likely an uber lift or some

comthing like that is going to do this than an automaker. And and I

and I believe you're right. But at the same time, there's a lot

of issues here of critical mass, you know, getting things at scale.

You know, most people who buy a car, they do it because they test drive it first. So how do you test drive what I talked about

in Birmingham, Michigan. How do you test drive owning a smaller US I'll

give you an example. You know, golf cars are really popular in retirement

communities, as I'm sure you're well aware. I was just earlier this month.

I was down in Key Biscne, just outside of Miami. Very very

very upscale community. You see these golf cars that there's parking spots at at

the shopping centers and food markets just for golf cars. And I had known

about the you know, the retirees and the retirement communities. What struck me

at in Key Biscane seeing teenagers drive around in these things electric ones, cool wheels, and that was the hot thing. So there's I think where you

should look for your answer, not why I agree makers, right, well, I agree with to John. I'm I'm not really looking for the automakers

to answer this. I'm just saying they kind of keep getting the funding,

they keep getting the support, and it's essentially blocking me and the people that want to work with me to create the future that I'm talking about. And

I don't think that that block is going to work so well. I mean,

like, do you lose jobs if the car companies can't flourish in this new age with their older model, Yes, you lose jobs. But we

also lost jobs in the asbestos industry. We stopped making asbestos and people lost

their jobs and there was no CEO anymore and no Vice presidents. But you

had new companies come and we I've just waited a quarter of a century for the automakers to kind of either give daylight to these ideas and let us find a path forward. It's been in the struggle. But I don't where the

where in the world do you see this sort of thing happening, Because you know, the US, I mean big country, a big white outspring.

You know in Europe is you know, there's bike paths everywhere. In fact,

I would say you'd be stunned how many bike paths there are in Detroit right now, in the city of Detroit, not out in the burbs, but in the city itself. And but are there other places where your vision

is starting to happen, you know, because the US would probably be about the last place to go there. Yeah, you may be right, I'm

not sure. So first, going back to your golf cart. So you

showed pictures of the golf cart a second ago, the young people drive in them. We did our research back in sun City, back in the day

when I started my company, and we found people driving golf carts instead of their Cadillacs in Sun City, Like, why are you driving your golf cart?

You have this nice Cadillac And they said, if I'm in my Cadillac people. I might wave at my friends, but if I'm in my golf

cart, I talk to them. It's about conviviality. And so there is

my model of the yacht being the Cadillac and the golf cart being in the dinghy, two categories of vehicles, and the golf cart not trying to be everything. In terms of where this starts, I mean Paul McCready. I

mentioned him early, the guy who created the first human powered playing across the English Channel. He's no longer with us, but he used to talk I

used to talk to about this stuff. And he talked about how you light

a fire. You don't just take a match to a log in the fireplace.

You put it under the kinley in there, under the little paper under the kinley, Like how do you start this? And so you find the

places you can start these things. And I do believe there are probably bigger

opportunity in United States than you might think in this conversation. But for a

kind of a full suite of mobility options. The little vehicle might do great

for me in a place, but how do I go farther? And I

don't our conventional public transit. You get on a bus and it stops every

block and someone puts in their two dollars or whatever, and it takes forever to go somewhere. Like that, to me is not compelling as the go

far solution across the metro area. So I'm hoping that the uber lift companies

or whatever start making vans that go from like Birmingham straight to ann Arbor and you're sitting in like a pod seat. That's in my book actually a picture

of like a pod seat where you're in this van. You could make calls

and watch a movie and relax, and then you get to ann Arbor there's a little scooter you can rent. So it's this multimodal thing. But in

terms of like leap frogging, actually Detroit area doesn't really have much of a public transit system, so that would be an interesting area to kind of do this van network I'm talking about. But Africa, I mean Africa's poised to

leap frog ass all. They don't have the infrastructure. They could be building

a complete modern, kind of more compelling multimodal future with smaller personal vehicles that are enclosed or the little pod vehicles could drive around ann Arbor and then could attach to like some sort of a carrier vehicle, like a ferry, and that takes you out to ann Arbor and you could like never leave your seat.

You could be watching your movie oblivious that you've just changed to two different modes and got to ann Arbor with this little vehicle. So it's a future

of right sizing. It's a future of this mobility as a service. But

it's also the thing we designers, car designers or whatever. We focus on

the user. We want the user experience to be great, and the user

experience on the ebike in snow is not great. And as great as ebikes

are, how do you bring an enclosed vehicle into a form factor that fits for these local vehicles. And the safety, as you said, it's a

huge thing. So we can make the little vehicle safer like the smart car

met FMVSS crash standards, or we can basically segregate vehicles. We don't put

bumpers on bicycles. Or we can actually dig into apart spin of the av

company and say I want some sensors in my little car driving around Birmingham and if someone's coming up behind me, like some hotshot kid and a sixteen year old kid in a high performance Mustang is now coming down Lincoln or one of these streets like twenty miles too fast, Like give me a sensor that lets me know this is coming. Like, let's figure out how to make the

smaller vehicles safe in these local applications. So so Dan, what comes first?

The vehicle or the infrastructure, the chicken or the egg. They that's

the hardest part in all this thing to me, it's it's to me, it's like, we really want to be able to test drive. Like if

I was trying to sell residents of Birminghu on this future, I would like to be able to mock up Birmingham for a Saturday Sunday, you know, not have the big cars in there and kind of let and then have like two hundred small vehicles show up and let people try them. But try the

vehicle, and try with a modified travel environment for the street, and maybe try those mobility extension those services. It'll take you to ann Arbor. If

you can try that whole package and we can see that the dogs will eat the dog food, then we can look creatively at how to bring the companies and the services online to provide the solution people will not use vehicles or services that are not available to them period. Like it has to be available,

right, I mean, it has to be something you can choose. Hey,

look, we got to take a quick commercial break, but let's come back to this conversation. I'd love to get your ideas on autonomy and how

that all fits into what you're talking about. But first a shout out to

our great sponsor, Bridgestone. How do Bridgestone tire stop shorter on what roads?

Is there hydrotrack technology? But you don't have to know how the science

works, just where the brain is. What really matters is they're Bridgestone.

Hey. Hey, the good news for Bridgestone is that all this mobility stuff

that you're talking about is going to need wheedles and tires too. Maybe new

sized ones, yeah, definitely, and smaller ones, bigger ones, all kinds of ones. Yeah. So let's talk autonomy because it seems to be

a perfect fit for what you're talking about, with purpose built autonomous vehicles like Waymow is talking or they've shown their vehicles so his zuits. Of course,

GM Cruise has got theirs that's coming out later this year. What do you

think? So there's a picture of my book that I'll bring up. Can

get the three silos. So I have I have, I have three silos.

I have the government, big Auto, and mobility digital so big so government is the Department of Transportation, whether it's US, federal, state, county, city, whatever. And then big Auto we know all the car

companies, you all know the fourteen large OEMs or whatever then immerged today.

And then the digital mobility services which started with uberlift, car pooling other apps and now is getting the autonomous come in there. And obviously the autonomous is

starting blending with big auto in some level. So first off, you know

Larry Page. I've never met him, but you know, I think he

has sort of a twinkle in his eye for transportation. I had heard he

wanted to create a PRT system personal wrapp and transit for Michigan Campus in ann Arboro when he was there years back. And then he funded the first Google

self driving car, and that was sort of like the first thing that sort of woke up the automakers that disruption could be coming their way. But as

you've seen the players come into the autonomous space, they have more or less a computer science background. They're not transportation people. They wouldn't be able to

list the car designers that we've talked about before the show and so and when they come out to the world and they see three hundred million fast heavy vehicles and they don't see any of the little cars I'm talking about, they don't see them. They just say, well, I'm gonna make the fast heavy

vehicle autonomous. So they just start focusing on this one large scale vehicle,

which is where you see these early concepts from Cruise Wayman and whatnot. It's

all sort of the highway car scale vehicle being addressed as an autonomous vehicle.

In my book, I'll talk about I talk about that there are applications for a smaller, local use, small or form of an autonomous vehicle or automated vehicle that travels on a track. So I'm a big advocate for the future

of timous vehicles, at least for higher speed travel. I want people to

ride bicycles. I mean to be quite honest. If you ride a bike

to work, the recent studies show that you have a fifty four percent lower chance of getting heart disease and a forty percent chance of getting cancer if you ride a bike. So to me, our country should be making it easier

for people to ride a bike, and thin city, as I call thin city, I would say less than one percent to ride a bike. So

if I'm an autonomous vehicle company, I want to do my autonomy, but I also want to help cities get more people riding bikes. And on a

nice day in Palo Alto, California, riding a mile to the store bike is going to be a better solution than autonomous vehicle. But so I'm a

big advocate for this autonomous future, but I think it needs to be balanced.

But these companies like the robotaxis the application. So I mentioned my friend

Doug Field, so he's at Ford and you've seen the announcements. They're going

hot and heavy to make a vehicle that can you buy, you own, and it's going to drive you from let's say Detroit up to your cottage in northern Michigan, and it's going to drive for you. You don't have to

keep your eyes on the road. And that's a sensible application, but you're

going to own that vehicle. The robotax is a different thing where essentially it's

a shared vehicle and it's about getting a ride somewhere, And it started with the idea that the computer was going to replace the car driver or the uber driver, and that was going to take the price point way lower. But

the problem the robotaxi people are going to have is that their service alone by itself is not going to convince I don't think it's going to convince that many people to sell their car. The robotaxi companies really need to work with all

these other new service providers and other solutions or that local car or whatever it's going to be. But when you don't, when you no longer own a

car, now you depend on the quality and the performance of the network.

And it's like we fly on airplanes across the country. We rent a car

when we get there. You know, if the plane only flies one over

three days, or when you land in Miami and you can't even get a car, it's the performance of the network that matters, not the actual vehicle as you own it in your garage. So the robotaxi application is going to

be dependent. I think I'm working more with this bigger new world of mobility

providers and vehicle providers that are more right sized to create a solution where someone can say I don't need to own a second car, or I don't even need to own any cars, and I can do this. But the robotaxi

service by a loan, I don't think is going to have as big of an impact as they think. But anyways, I do think fifty years from

now, people are not driving cars at eighty miles an hour. And I

know, I know what it's like to drive on the Audubon. It's fun.

But when Henry Ford made the Model T, there was two billion people.

Now there's eight billion, and we just can't keep doing what we've been doing, you know, just letting this loan after out on the road this with their three empty seats and then times a million and watch how it happens.

So, I mean one of the one of the things I think that's being lost in some of this, Dan is is the fact that again I remember years ago you were telling me about how it's it's basically vehicle for purpose.

And so for people who love cars, you know, if somebody still wants to have a Mustang, you're not suggesting no, no, no, they should ride a bike. No, I agree, And so like car

sharing to date, like my friend Dave Books, started carshon United States twenty five years ago, and I think at last I saw the figures from was like twenty nineteen. It was like twenty five thousand car share vehicles. I'm

like, out of three hour million, Like, that's not much traction.

And it's like we're in thin city. If I walk into my house in

thin city and I like, where's my shared car, Oh, it's a mile away and it's a Nissan Versa. Nothing against the Versa, but it's

not that exciting to me. So I'm not going to walk an hour to

get a car to a hour. So there's issues there. But yes,

if you have sort of the car library that you know, I have different vehicles, and so to me, it's like dieting. It's like if someone

has let's say a car that they drive eighteen thousand miles a year or twelve thousand miles a year and they put a lot of carbon in the air.

I mean, remember when you pick up a gallon of gasoline six pounds of weight, and it burns through your engine, it comes out and you can't see it, but it's twenty pounds of carbon every six pounds of gallons of gas. It's twenty pounds of carbon. So we had this huge problem.

But if but to try to say, oh, here's my future mobility system, electric dis electric to that electric dis electric, that it's this perfect thing, except there's not that much charging infrastructure, and it's really expensive and on steps. Like I mean, if I was in Jim Farley's job, I

would be like creating these mobility bundles and these shared systems. But if somebody

reduces their carbon footprint by ninety percent by being smarter about this, I'd say, I rent my gasoline for GT on Saturday, take it out there, and I'll go to the Mayor of Michigan and give you an Audubon stretch to run this thing in one hundred and forty Like I mean, like, yes, use the vehicles and have fun with them, but ultimately let's get our carbon footprint way way down. But I would love to be able to wake

up in the morning like with my phone or like I go to bed.

Which car do I want in my driveway? Do I want, you know,

a little car to get around Michigan, like a little smart car or something that's the cheapest thing, or do I want some swanky thing or I want a Mercedes S Class or I want whatever I want. I want a

van, or I want a sprinter van to take the entire kid soccer team to ice cream. I mean, I want the vehicle that's perfect for the

thing. So it's a mission specific vehicle. And we really haven't gotten there

yet. And those car sharing companies they don't know cars so much and they

just kind of think all five of these cars and it all work. But

the car designer knows. The car designer knows which cars are cool and which

cars people respond to. But we're not called I mean as a vehicle designer,

we're not called by the governments in the government agency. If you're if

your Department transportation, did you come up the idea of Uber? No,

you just wait for some company to come up with an idea and then you respond to it and you make Uber work for your citizens. You didn't think

about the scooter share, just wait for someone come up with it. Why

isn't our Department Transportation imagining what it could be, engaging vehicle designers saying we could be making these vehicles these services and then go out to the commercial world, to the industries and say who can provide this at the right price point, you know, and win the contract. We need to flip it upside

down in my opinion, but ultimately your point, we need to go to that mission specific vehicle and we should have fun with these vehicles that we can check out and use. And hasn't really started yet, Dan, I would

throw this all back in your lap. And I would never count on the

major automakers to get into this. I don't think that's ever going to happen.

I wouldn't count on the government to figure it out either. You need

entrepreneurs and they need to be inspired by designers like you that design these things, because, as you know, Sean's believing, when people see something they know instantly at cool, they know instantly how it could fit their lifestyle, but they have to see it before they can make that that transition. I

agree with you, John, And but what it's been like for me, you know, just working on all this, it's it's you know, it's been a lot. Like you go to a downtown city here in Denver.

You know, I'm close to Denver, So you go to downtown Denver and someone's going to build a sixty story building and all what it feels like for me is like, all these contractors have shown up. All these contractors are

like, we're going to build this mobility future. They're saying what you're saying,

what's not weight for automakers. But there's no blueprint. There's no blueprint.

It's all these contractors ready to build something. And so this is my

first blueprint. There you go, okay, all right, start showing your

book. So you know what velomobiles are. I'm a huge proponent of velomobiles.

I've been pushing these things for a couple of decades and all different kinds of people have tried to come out with velomobiles, and just so so the audience knows, a velomobile is a vehicle that you actually pedal. It's typically

just for one person. It has all weather capability. It's safer than a

bicycle, though I'm not going to say it's safe as compared to like an automobile. And yet these things have never caught on. I cannot explain for

the life of me why they have not caught on. And that's why I'm

saying, I think there you go, absolutely you know what I'm talking about here. Yeah, same issue. It's like when Doug Field rings a segue

he and he hired me as a consultant. Goes, you made the same

mistake we made, And I said, what's that? He goes, you

made a vehicle. There's no real place for it in the city, in

the country. And it's like, there's truth to it. It's like,

where's the Segua's supposed to go. It's not going to go into car lane.

Is it really going to go on a bike lane? Is it going

to go on a sidewalk? Where's the Vela mobile supposed to go? It's

not going to go down Woodward Avenue in the center of a car lane.

Is it going to go on a bike lane? I don't know if there's

bike lanes on Woodward Avenue down or not not on Woodward. But so we

we haven't really created a place. It's like we created air airplanes and no

one said, like, but we need airports. I mean, like,

you've got to create the infrastructure for these kinds of things. And so that's

what we really haven't done yet. And that's what I'm hoping that we will

start to do. And the vlamobile is a great thing. There's another part

of my book where I talk about co creation and the fact that I started.

You know, I was a car designer and I first started general motors like I was hired by Chuck Jordan and Jerry Palmer at Art Center the same day the Challenger Space shuttle blew up. Was a weird omen to remember,

but um send. Actually I went on to start my cart own, a

little car like car company, like a golf cart for the street. Is

now the gem Car. I don't own it, but it's still in production.

But it's like a golf cart. But I didn't want to start a

company, but I was reluctant entrepreneur. I wanted to do these smaller vehicles

and and so, and I really wanted a cushy job doing important projects.

But I couldn't find that, so I started this company. But the point

I'm trying to make is these little vehicles, the vlomobiles, what I call the Tier one lightlow speed modes. They're not for the highway, they're not

FMVSS compliant. They could be made by high school students. You could make

your own version of it. So if we're going to go into this future,

and you're going to just count on these big OEMs to come to your town and solve all your problems. I think that it's great with the tier

ones that these could be created in more of a cottage industry approach. Instead

of having one factory making one hundred thousand cars, we might have, you know, a thousand factories making a small, small batch of vehicles. And

they're in the vehicles that are designed for Michigan or the Great Lakes megaregion, which is like fifty five million people where it's snows, you have cold weather.

But those little vehicles are not going to get on the highway. They're

not going to travel to Florida, southern California. So the Florida vehicles and

the Southern California vehicles thom might be the same, but they could be designed for those weather environments or other kinds of you know, things that the local market wants. But the idea that young people could actually make their vehicle.

So my golf cart vehicle, the gem car. When I go to Santa

Monica, California, I see them driving around and people smiling. It's a

great feeling. Like you can do a pottery class and you can make a

pot but like I made a vehicle that's taller than a minivan drives down the street and people are usually smiling when they're driving it, and it's fun and it's really fun to see a vehicle you created in a city. And I

think high school kids, college kids, the interested public would love to see one a vehicle come down the street that they had a part of creating.

And I think that's completely available to us with three D print low investment tooling.

When I started my company, you know, it was a two million dollar investment that got us going in nineteen ninety four. We found a venture

capitalists firm that would do it. Nobody wanted to do it, no one

wanted to compete with a big auto, but it was CAT Engineering. If

there wasn't CAD, I wouldn't have had a company because we had one guy in the back of our shop just just knocking out these little brackets and parts and extrusions, you know with CAD, and it's like six hundred parts in subassemblies that composed my first vehicle. And you know, we put this thing

in production for two million dollars. So so Danum, I love all these

ideas, and the thing is that a lot of them work, especially in areas where there's a lot of people. But when you look at vast swass

of America, like sprawling cities, you know that you have in Texas or anywhere in the middle of the US where um, you know, just suburbia where you're maybe you know, four miles from the service. You essentially can't

really exist in the these neighborhoods, are these cities without a car? How

do you how do you solve how do we get there in those situations?

How do you solve that? In your opinion? Well, so, um,

I won't keep pulling images that are shaky in my book, but essentially there's a new framework on posing. So you've heard me talk about the dual

tier. Now having our car, which is really a monoculture of this one

size car change into two forms a small local vehicle and the cars we have so we have the yacht and the dinghy. The other part of this is

a new mobility network across a major metropolitan area. So, um, what

I think of this is it's a weird analogy. But it's like if you

look at the videos of America from like I mean, I don't know if there's not videos of this, but it's like if we were up an airship from nineteen hundred to today. And we watched our compact little cities before the

Model T and they were these compact little downtowns. They might have had trolleys

or whatnot. And then the car came and the car actually became a design

tool for creating a new urban form, you know, the suburbs, and the car allowed these suburbs. So like we watch, you can there's a

video of Sacramento or Las Vegas, or you can just watch these cities grow.

And it's like, to me, it's like watching someone said, like molasses spread. I think of it's like blood. It's like it's blood flowing

out. And then it's like what we now don't need to do is go

in. It's almost like acupuncture and create these mobility hubs, like every two

miles from any you know, from each other, so you're never more than a mile and a half from a mobility hub. And a mobility hub is

this teeny teeny little airport, if you will, where you switch from your little local vehicle to this tier two vehicle to take you across your CITYR region.

So essentially, to me, that's like you put this little pin, you put this little mobility hub at a grocery store in you know somewhere, let's say, and again back to Birmingham. You go to that parking lot

and you have this place where these vans show up, and you can rent these cars and your little vehicle around Birmingham. You can drive it there,

get out of that, get the far car for the highway, or you get into this band and go to ann Arbor. And so we're putting these

little pins. To me, that's like plotting the blood. That's like actually

enabling us to start creating some density in our neighborhood centers. And so is

that model familiar to us? Yes, it's exactly what we have with our

airplanes. Our airports allow the tier two, the cars and the vans or

whatever, the drive us around Denver. I go to the airport I fly.

So let's say Atlanta, I get off the airplane there and then I have these options. I rent a car Tier two, I get an uber

ride Tier two. I might take transit, which I'd call tier two.

So I'm just shrinking the Tier two, the Tier three inter connection the airport down to tier one and tier two. So it's not going to work for

everybody. You know, if you're a real estate agent, you've got to

drive your customers to all these houses around the city. You're going to own

a car, but for a lot of people to have a second car beingcome smaller, to go to a mobility hub and have good ways to get across town when you need to, which is not so often, and all this, you know, the pandemic. The silver lining was we're doing and what

we're doing now, all this virtual connectivity, it's all about access. Access

is what it's all about. You know, ten trillion dollars of transportation is

a subset of access and all the connectivity what we're doing now of virtual access and Amazon deliveries and stuff, that's all connectivity. It's all about access though,

And so I think we can start transforming our metro areas by putting mobility hubs in and helping ten twenty percent of us start transitioning to this new kind of mobility bundle, saving ten times more than that little Geico lizards going to save you and seeing people talk more, the social walk more, create space for bikes. I mean, where is the space for bike lanes? It's

in those empty seats that we're driving around in our cars. That's where the

space for bike lanes is. There's another section of my book called the narrow

car, like the Nissan a land Glider, which just just it's a highway car, but it's just tandem seats. It's half of the with the the

lane, and so you can put two cars and one lane on a highway.

So we just you know, And I have a great forward in my book by Dan Sperling, who I worked with for over twenty years. And

Dan Sperling is a key person on the California a Resources Board, very influential, and then he started the Institute of Transportation set UC Davis and he says, am, I forward is like all of us talk about electrification, not a word about these vehicles are huge. So so Dan, I mean one

of the points, I mean you talk, you breezed by this, and I think this is important that when you were talking about you know, okay, so we all have smart devices, and so I mean, isn't what you're talking about predicated largely on the ability for people to know that if they go to one of these smart hubs that there would be a vehicle waiting for them. Because I mean, I think a big concern is is that you

know, if if you know I'm not going to give up my Tier two car or whatever it is, if I don't know that absolutely, So I mean here I will hear those kinds of things, you know, I'll hear people say well, and this is not to your question, but it's like people say, well, my car is a status symbol. I was like,

well, flying Virgin first Class is a status and symbol. But that's

a service. We can have status in our services, and we have status

in the types of vehicles we rent. But in terms of what you just

said, in terms of I mentioned earlier, its network performance, So you're right. I mean, if you tell me I can have this oversized vehicle

in my house and it costs all this money, but I know it's in my garage, I know it'll start, I know it'll take me somewhere.

Sure, that is something someone's going to stay with. So if we're going

to want people to have a better option, that's going to save them a lot of money, it's going to make their life nicer, make it easier to walk and bike, all this better stuff for their neighborhood, all the decarbonization. If we want all that stuff to happen. We've got to focus

on that network performing. I don't know how many people that are going to

rent cars in America today at the airports, don't know how many of them are worried that there will be no car for them. I don't think a

lot are worried that there's no car for them today. And they might have

asked for a fancy Sedan and they say we don't have that, sir.

You can take a Mustang convertible and they'll say, like okay, but like there's a car. If Hurts can figure out how to have a car for

people at the airport and provide that service, and I fly across the country and I know there's a car for me, then I think we have the capability of humans and as businesses and who as governments to figure out how to have a high performing network so I don't have to worry about that. But

Americans, in our mindset of a car has always been I have a car, Therefore I can get around go where I need to go. I don't

need to worry about anything. And then we introduce car sharing, and the

people in the early car sharing days think like I'm gonna have car sharing and that's all people are going to need to get around. Well, no,

that's not the case because when you don't have that vehicle that you own as your own proprietary vehicle that you own or lease, and you now have to rely on the network. I mean, I'm looking out the window at a

shared bike station, Like if I want a shared bike there right now, and there's no bikes, I'm pissed off, right, So now I need a secondary solution for my local needs or my travel needs wherever they are.

That's okay, there's no bikes, but right there there's a car I can like, Okay, I'll switch, but okay, it's going to cost me more of the network will pay for my difference. We need those redundancies and

overlap. We needed a network so you never have to worry that you can't

get to where you want to go when you want to go. Well,

you know, another thing that we need is, as we've been talking to here, as an infrastructure. So going back to the golf car example,

that's great, but it's only legal on roads with speeds of twenty five mile an hour limits on them. Sure, I can't leave my house in a

car like that. I'm pointing out the window as if you guys can see

the road out there, you know, you can drive through the neighborhood, but now you're blocked, and if you were to go out on the road, you pose a danger to yourself and others. So I you know,

so I mean absolutely correct. And so you know, if I if I

was a billionaire, which I'm not, you know, I might you know, just take something like the size of a smart car. I mean,

we've all seen the original smart car on the highway in America. It's like

what like a smart car is like the size of a snowball. It's a

tall white you know, when you see it on a highway, it's like that thing does not belong on the highway. You could make a vehicle like

the smart car. You could make it FMVSS compliant for less money than you

probably think if you get past this conventional approach to doors. I mean,

we how much money does an automaker spend hang a door in space with a side impact being and then have the consumer look at the highlights on a BMW and say, oh, the highlights. I mean, the consumer doesn't know

they're looking at the highlights flow perfectly through that door to the next door.

But when they see it like in a nineteen eighty two Ford Escort and watch the highlights drop down at the door, they know it's a piece of crap car. But like if I just said I got the money, I'm gonna

make a car that's FMVSS compliant. I'm gonna put in a side impact beam

like a minimoke, and then I'm gonna have like a door, a window, and a door that's like a visor slips back and someone eighty years old.

I'm not going to drive this thing, but someone twenty five will step into it, have a safety tub, not have all this expensive engineering, all this stuff, and it will be a sufficient crash tested vehicle for less than fifty miles an hour or so, and then I can drive it anywhere I talk about in Michigan. I'm just not going to go on the highway

with it. And guess what, there's the Insharance Institute giving out stars.

I don't even care if I have more than one star. If you're gonna

sell motorcycles that go three hundred miles an hour across the street and tell me I can't get into this vehicle and the world burn in I can't afford to put my kids in college, Like what's going on here? So NITZA needs

to step it up. They need to focus on these small vehicles. My

little vehicle couldn't go over twenty five mile our top speed. The people who

use them every day in Santa Monica places, they've all spent out to thirty five. Thirty five works pretty good. But and then you've got the Renault

Twizzi forty nine miles an hour with an air bag. Those aren't legal here.

You can get that two or fifty mile an hour motorcycle. And then

there's Archie Moto who has no more safety equipment really than mine, and just take off a wheel, Dan, it's a motorcycle that can go seventies.

Oh wow, this really makes a lot of sense. You know, makes

no sense at all. So Dan, over the years you've you've held design

camps for young people and so you've interacted with them. I mean, so

it would seem to me that by now some of them have to be in positions whereby they can make a difference. I mean, are you seeing anything

well, I mean it goes back to what I said earlier about co creating.

I mean Henry Ford democratize the automobile. I want to democratize the car

factory. But in terms of the amount of design camps I've had, it's

very limited. I mean, I've done some wonderful ones, and one of

them is in my book from Target Design Camp. Target Corporation gave a lot

of money for a one week high school program and we just had the most fun. And I had parents come back and tell me the next year how

much better their kids did in school and all of this. But none of

those have been like sending me big projects lately, so that where they are.

But ultimately, it's fun to co create. If we're going to build

a better world, it's great that more people can be involved with it.

And the three D printing and all this technology is really well suited for it.

So I think co creation, and I say in the book, I don't have any good examples of co creation in vehicle space, but I think with this kind of separation now of the yacht and the Duinhey, I think co creating Dinghy's is possible. But we do need to work with the cities

we do. I mean, to John's point about the safety. Yeah,

I can make an FMBSS compliant vehicle. But to restripe us street, that's

paint, that's a stripe. I mean a street really is a solution space.

And think of it was the opposite. Think if the whole United States

was driving those little bird scooters and then someone said, well, I want to take an automobile with three empty seats everywhere I go, Like, imagine how hard that would be. I mean, like that would be impossible.

So like taking our oversized streets, our oversized parking lots and starting to shrink and deep paving some of it, and having your the supermarket parking lot, which is huge, having a third of that now for repurpose for housing, for growing food, for skateboard parks, whatever it's going to be. I

mean, we can get all this land, all this homelessness, Like let's make affordable housing by right size and our transportation. And that's probably a good

point to wrap this up. But before we go, hold your book up

again and give no I'm serious about this, because what's your hands covering up part of the title? Okay, near too far? Okay, just so

everybody knows, and it's it's on Amazon. Amazon says it's a paperback it's

a softcover book. It says two hundred forty eight pages. It has one

hundred pages of pictures. The list price is thirty nine dollars. I think

it's usually being sold at a discount, so it's it's it's over thirty five years and it's like thirty nine years of mark so it's like a dollar a year of my pain, misery and learning in this process. That's great.

Well with that, thanks for coming on the show, Mike, great having YouTube and Gary will do another show again next week. Okay, Jen,

thanks everybody for having tuned in. Thank you Autoline after Hours. It brought

to you by Bridge Stone Tires Solutions for your Journey. If you like this

program, I would like to learn more about the automotive industry. Check out

our website at auto line dot tv, or look for us on YouTube on the auto line channel

AAH #645 - Who Needs to Own Cars in the Age of Mobility?

About this episode

Honda Civic

Fiat Spider

Ford Capri

Ford Model T

Chevrolet Corvette

Ford Mustang

Request an Explanation

Want to learn more?

Help improve this episode

More from Autoline After Hours