The choices we make today shape our world tomorrow.
Author mpescePosted on Co-host Sally Dominguez looks beyond battery-powered vehicles, opening the door to a future featuring hydrogen, “paste”, and ammonia-powered engines. This diverse transition from fossil fuels enables a range of new vehicles for all of the ways we’ll live and work in the decades to come.
Sally’s new book EPIC Resilience is a great guide to staying match-fit in an ever changing world. Grab a copy here!
Author mpescePosted on Special correspondent Drew Smith explores a European car market that appears to have reached a tipping point in sales of electric vehicles. Is it real? Is it sustainable? Can the power grid handle all those new EVs?
Drew asks the experts – and gets some surprising answers.
Drew co-authors the amazing ‘Looking Out’ newsletter – read the latest one here.
Author mpescePosted on Physical distancing makes personal transportation a necessity. When public transport risks infection, cars & bikes become our safe spaces. Co-host Sally Dominguez looks at the sudden reframing of the automobile as self-contained ‘safe space’ during the pandemic. Special correspondent Drew Smith rhapsodises about the Renault Espace, the first MPV designed – to carry people.
Be sure to sign up for Drew Smith’s “Looking Out” newsletter – grab it here.
Author mpescePosted on Now that we know the state of play, we ask the big question: can the automotive sector thrive? Mark, Sally & Drew reflect on what they’ve learned on their journey.
Author mpescePosted on It’s the birth of ‘fabless’ production – manufacturing without huge capital investment. Will we be able to design a car ourselves – inexpensively and safely?
Author mpescePosted on Is our transportation future a sleek clean sci-fi vision or a Max Max redux with added robotics? Could it be hell on wheels – or heaven on earth? Mark, Sally and Drew each explore their own versions of the perfect – and less-than-perfect automotive worlds to come.
Author mpescePosted on Waste? Not! Designing cars for near-perfect recycling – is it even possible, or do the next billion end up as junk? How do we rethink a sustainable future around billions of automobiles? And can EVs promise zero carbon emissions?
We reference a lot of material on this episode, including this BP report on how much carbon we’re adding to the atmosphere every year. And a great article on recycling shredded automobiles.
Author mpescePosted on Apps have turned us into ride-sharing, route-planning, ‘micromobility’ experts. We’re all passengers now, with more options than ever before.
LEK Partner Mark Streeting is an expert in ‘mobility-as-a-service’, a new term for the kind of seamless end-to-end transportation pioneered by Uber…
Special correspondent Drew Smith spoke with ZipCar co-founder Robin Chase about how the city has been defined by cars – and what it means to move past that into the age of passengers.
And co-host Sally Dominguez found an intriguing Chinese startup – Grove Hydrogen Automotive – building hydrogen-fuel-cell powered vehicles and offering them to drivers on a ‘subscription’ basis – as a path toward jump-starting hydrogen fueling infrastructure throughout the nation.
Author mpescePosted on Will we cling to of the thrill of acceleration, rush of adrenaline, and roar of a petrol engine? Are we losing our emotional connection to the car?
Author mpescePosted on Transformations in autonomy & electrification give automobile designers a new palette of possibilities – does our experience of driving change?
Drew Smith talks to BMW design legend Chris Bangle about what it took to design the REDSPACE urban car for the Chinese market. And here’s a video where he’s talking at the Art Center College for Design in Pasadena (Chris’s alma mater, and the school that graduates most of the world’s top car designers):
Mark and Sally sat down at the North American International Auto Show for a long interview with recently-retired Ford design legend Elizabeth Baron, about what it took to combine the real and virtual design processes into a seamless whole.
Finally, Sally learns about the design possibilities created by autonomous vehicles from Luciano Nakamura, one of the founders of Australian startup AEV Robotics.
Author mpescePosted on Tesla drove electric vehicles from impractical to inevitable. Powertrains will soon feature a mix of hydrocarbons, hydrogen – and batteries.
Co-host Sally Dominguez toured China in a hydrogen-fueled Mercedes:
The history of the automobile isn’t exactly the history of petrol – even if that’s what Carl Benz used in his internal combustion engine, there have always been lots of alternatives, including the Stanley ‘Steamer’:
The London Electrobus Company pioneered electric public transport over a hundred years ago – promoting itself as the cleaner alternative on London’s dirty streets:
Automobiles can even run on compressed air, as in the TATA/MDI OneCat:
Special correspondent Drew Smith talks to automotive design legend Mate Rimac about what it takes to design electric automobiles.
How long until we have self-driving cars? That’s the biggest question confronting the entire transportation sector. Autonomy unlocks a lot of amazing possibilities – but what is it, really, and how far away?
In this second episode of THE NEXT BILLION CARS, Special Correspondent Drew Smith details the five levels of autonomy, Mark goes for a LIDAR ride with Nick Langdale-Smith of Sydney startup Baraja, and Sally learns about a software back-seat driver from Intel’s Jack Weast – one that may help us be better human drivers, as well.
Here’s a great backgrounder on Toyota’s ‘Guardian’ system – software that helps both humans and autonomous vehicles be better drivers.
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