INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Welcome back to Transportation Weekly; I&m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch
This is the fourth edition of our newsletter, a weekly jaunt into the wonderful world of transportation and how we (and our packages)
move.
This week we chat with Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath, dig into Lyft S-1, take note of an emerging trend in AV development, and check
out an experiment with paving
Oh, and how could we forget Tesla.
Never heard of TechCrunch Transportation Weekly Catch up here, here and here
As I&ve written before, consider this a soft launch
Follow me on Twitter@kirstenkorosecto ensure you see it each week
(An email subscription is coming).
ONM …
There are OEMs in the automotive world
And here, (wait for it) there are ONMs — original news manufacturers
(Cymbal clash!) This is where investigative reporting, enterprise pieces and analysis on transportation lives.
This week, we&re featuring
excerpts taken from a one-on-one interview with Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath.
On February 27, Volvo standalone electric performance brand
Polestar introduced its first all-electric vehicle, a five-door fastback called the Polestar 2
The EV, which has a 78 kWh battery pack and can travel 275 miles (estimated EPA guidance) on a single charge, will be manufactured at a new
factory in Chengdu, China
Other notable specs: The infotainment system will be powered by Android OS, Polestar is offering subscriptions to the vehicle, and
production starts in 2020.
Here is what Ingenlath had to say to me about …
EV charging infrastructure
To bevery unpolitical, I think it
would be totally stupid if we were to aimto develop electric charging infrastructure on our own or for our brand specifically
If you join the electric market today, of course, you would see partnerships; that&ssensible thing to do
Car companies together are making a big effort in getting out a network of necessary charging stations along the highway.
That what we&re
doing; we&re teaming up and have the contracts being designed and soon signed.
On the company approach to automation
The terminology is
We very clearly put that into a different picture, we&re not talking about, and we clearly do not ever want to label it, an &autopilot.& The
focus of thissystem is a verysafe distance control, which brakes for you and accelerates for you, and of course, the lane keeping
Thisis not about developing an autopilot system, it is about giving your safety
And that&s where we don&t want to provoke people thinking that they have full rollout autopilot system there
But it is a system that helps you being safe and protected on the road.
I also reached out to Transportation Weekly readers and asked what
they wanted to know and then sent some of those questions to Ingenlath.
TW Reader: How did it feel taking one of your personal styling
elements & the C shaped rear lamps & from your previous brand over to Polestar
Ingenlath: It an evolutionary process.Polestar naturally
builds on its &mothers& DNA and as a new branch develops its own personality
Thor hammer, the rear light signature -—with each new model launch (Volvo and Polestar) those elements diverge into a brand specific
species.
TW Reader: How much do you still get to do what you love, which is design
Ingenlath: Being creative is still my main job, now
applied on a broader scope — trying to lead a company with a creative and brand building mindset
Still, I love the Fridays when I meet up with Robin and Max to review the models, sketches and new data
We really enjoy driving the design of both brands to new adventures.
Dig In
Tesla is finally going to offer customers a $35,000 Model 3
How the automaker is able to sell this electric vehicle at the long-awaited $35,000 price point is a big piece of that story — and one
In short, the company is blowing up its sales model and moving to an online only strategy
Tesla stores will close or be converted to &information centers& and retail employees will be laid off.
But this is not what we&re going
Tesla has also brought back its so-called &full self-driving& feature, which was removed as an option on its website last year
Owners can opt for Autopilot, which has automatic steering on highways and traffic-aware cruise control, or FSD.
FSD capability includes
several features such as Navigate on Autopilot that is supposed to guide a car from a highway on-ramp to off-ramp, including navigating
interchanges and making lane changes
FSD also includes Advanced Summon, Auto Lane Change, and Autopark
Later this year, the system will recognize and respond to traffic lights in more complex urban environments, Tesla says.
All of these
features require the driver to be engaged (or ready to take over), yet it called &full self-driving.& Now Tesla has two controversially
named automation features
As Andrew Hawkins at The Verge noted in his coverage, &experts are beginning to realize that the way we discuss, and how companies market,
autonomy is significant.&
Which begs the obvious question, and one that I asked Musk during a conference call on Thursday
&Isn&t it a problem that you&re calling this full self-driving capability when you&re still going to require the driver to take control or
be paying attention& (I also wanted to ask a followup on his response, but the moderator moved onto the next reporter).
His response:
&We
are very clear when you buy the car what is meant by full self driving
It means it feature complete, but feature complete requiring supervision.
As we get more — we really need billions of miles, if not maybe
10 billion sort of miles or kilometers on that order collectively from the fleet — then in our opinion probably at that point supervision
is not required, but that will still be up to regulators to agree.
So we&re just very clear
There really three steps: there being feature complete of full self driving that requires supervision, feature complete but not requiring
supervision, and feature complete not requiring supervision and regulators agree.
In other Tesla news, the National Transportation Safety
Board is investigating a crash, that at first glance seems to be similar to the fatal crash that killed Tesla owner Joshua Brown.
In
cooperation with the Palm Beach sheriff office, the NTSB is sending a team of three to conduct a safety investigation of the commercial
motor vehicle and Tesla crash in Delray Beach, FL.
— NTSB_Newsroom (@NTSB_Newsroom) March 2, 2019
A little bird …
We hear a lot
Let share.
It no secret that Pittsburgh is one of the hubs of autonomous vehicle development in the world
But what not so widely known — except for a group of government and company insiders — is that Mayor William Peduto is on the verge of
issuing an executive order that will give more visibility into testing there.
The city&sdepartment of mobility and infrastructure is the
central coordinator of this new executive order that aims to help guide testing and policy development there
The department is going to develop guidelines for AV testing, we&re told
And it appears that information on testing will be released to the public at least once a year.
Got a tip or overheard something in the
world of transportation Email me or send a direct message to@kirstenkorosec.
Deal of the week
Daimler and BMW are supposed to be
And they are, except with mapping (both part of the HERE consortium), mobility services (car sharing, ride-sharing), and now the development
of highly automated driving systems
The deal is notable because it illustrates a larger trend that has emerged as the AV industry hunkers down into the &trough of
disillusionment.& And that consolidation
If 2016, was the year of splashy acquisitions, then 2019 is shaping up to be chockfull of alliances and failures (of some startups).
Also
interesting to note, and one that will make some AV safety experts cringe, both companies are working on Level 3 driving automation, a
designation by the SAE that means conditional driving automation in which multiple high levels of automation are available in certain
conditions, but a human driver must be ready to take over
This level of automation is the most controversial because of the so-called &hand off& problem in which a human driver is expected to take
control of the wheel in time.
Speaking of partnerships, another deal that got our attention this week involved New York-based mapping and
data analytics startup Carmera and Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development
TRI-AD is an autonomous drive unit started by Toyota with Denso and Aisin
TRI-AD mission is to take the research being done over at the Toyota Research Institute and turn its into a product.
The two companies are
going to test a concept that will use cameras in Toyota test vehicles to collect data from downtown Tokyo and use it to create high
definition maps for urban and surface roads.
TRI-AD considers this the first step towards its open software platform concept known as
Automated Mapping Platform that will be used to support the scalability of highly automated driving, by combining data gathered from
vehicles of participating companies to generate HD maps
AMP is new and has possible widespread implications at Toyota
And TRI-AD is full of A-listers, including CEO James Kuffner, who came from the Google self-driving project and Nikos Michalakis, who built
Netflix cloud platform, and Mandali Khalesi, who was at HERE.
Read more on Khalesi and the Toyota open source ambitions here.
Other
deals:
India Ola spins out a dedicated EV business — and raised $56M
Volvo Cars has acquired a stake in Zūm, an on-demand ride
sharing service for children
Snapshot
Snapshot this week is a bit untraditional
It literally a snapshot of myself and my grandmother, months before her 100th birthday
Her memorial service was held Saturday
She loved cars and fast ones, but not so much driving them
And every time I got a new press car, we&d hit the road and she&d encourage me to take the turns a bit faster.
She also loved road trips
and in the 1920s, her father would drive the family on the mostly dirt roads from New Jersey to Vermont and even Canada
In her teens, she loved riding in the rumble seat, a feature found in a few vehicles at the time including the Ford Model A.
She was young
at heart, until the very end
Next week, we&ll focus on the youngest drivers and one automotive startup that is targeting that demographic.
Tiny but mighty
micromobility
Lyft S-1 lays out the risks associated with its micromobility business and its intent to continue relying on third parties to
manufacture its bikes and scooters
Here a key nugget about adoption:
&While some major cities have widely adopted bike and scooter sharing, there can be no assurance that new
markets we enter will accept, or existing markets will continue to accept, bike and scooter sharing, and even if they do, that we will be
able to execute on our business strategy or that our related offerings will be successful in such markets
Even if we are able to successfully develop and implement our network of shared bikes and scooters, there may be heightened public
skepticism of this nascent service offering.&
And another about seasonality:
&Our limited operating history makes it difficult for us to
assess the exact nature or extent of the effects of seasonality on our network of shared bikes and scooters, however, we expect the demand
for our bike and scooter rentals to decline over the winter season and increase during more temperate and dry seasons.&
Lyft, which bought
bike-share company Motivate back in July, also released some data about its electric pedal-assist bikes this week, showing that the pedal
assist bikes are, unsurprisingly, more popular than the traditional bikes
They also traveled longer distances and improved winter ridership numbers
Now, Lyft is gearing up to deploy 4,000 additional electric bikes to the Citi Bike system in New York City.
One more thing …
Google Maps
has added a feature that lets users see Lime scooters, pedal bikes and e-bikes right from the transit tab in over 80 new cities around the
Users can click the tab to find out if Lime vehicle is available, how long it&ll take to walk to the vehicle, an estimate of how much their
ride could cost, along with total journey time and ETA.
Notable reads
If take the time to read anything this week (besides this newsletter),
spend some time with Lyft S-1
The ride-hailing company prospectus mentions autonomous 109 times
In short, yeah, it something the company executives are thinking about and investing in.
Lyft says it has a two-pronged strategy to bring
autonomous vehicles to market
The company encouraging developers of autonomous vehicle technology to use its open platform to get access to its network and enable their
vehicles to fulfill rides on the Lyft platform
And Lyft is trying to build its own autonomous vehicle system at its confusingly named &Level 5 Engineering Center.&
The company primary
investors are Rakuten with a 13 percent stake, GM with 7.8 percent, Fidelity with 7.7 percent, Andreessen Horowitz with 6.3 percent and
Alphabet with 5.3 percent
GM and Alphabet have business units, GM Cruise and Waymo respectively, that are also developing AV technology.
Through Lyft partnership with
AV systems developer and supplier Aptiv, people in Las Vegas have taken more than 35,000 rides in Aptiv autonomous vehicles with a safety
driver since January 2018.
One of the &risks& the company lists is &a failure to detect a defect in our autonomous vehicles or our bikes or
scooters&
Other quotable notables:
Check out the Pedestrian Traffic Fatalities by State report, a newly released report from Volvo Car USA
and The Harris Poll called The State of Electric Vehicles in America.
Testing and deployments
Again, deployments doesn&t always mean the
latest autonomous vehicle pilot.
On Saturday, Sidewalk Labs hosted its Open Sidewalk event in Toronto
This is part of Sidewalk Toronto, a joint effort by Waterfront Toronto and Alphabet Sidewalk Labs to create a &mixed-use, complete
community& on Toronto Eastern Waterfront
The idea of this event was to share ideas and prototypes for making outdoor public space the
&social default year-round.& One such prototype &hexagonal paving& got our attention because of its use case for traffic control and
pedestrian and bicyclist safety
(Pictured below)
These individual precast concrete slabs are movable and permeable, can light up and give off heat
The idea is that these hexagonal-shaped slabs and be used to clear snow and ice in trouble spots and light up to warn drivers and
pedestrians of changes to the street use or to illuminate an area for public uses or even designate bike lanes and hazard zones
And because they&re permeable they can be used to absorb stormwater or melted snow and guide it to underground stormwater management
systems.
Sidewalk Labs tell me that the pavers have &plug and play& holes, which allow things like bike racks, bollards, and sign posts to
Sidewalk Labs initially built these with wood, and the new prototype is the next iteration, featuring modules built from concrete.
On our
radar
There is a lot of transportation-related activity this month.
The Geneva Motor Show: Press days are March 5 and March 6
Expectconcept, prototype and production electric vehicles from Audi, Honda, Kia, Peugeot, Pininfarina, Polestar, Spanish car company Hispano
Suiza, and Volkswagen.
SXSW in Austin: TechCrunch will be at SXSW this coming week
Here where I&ll be.
2 p.m
March 9 at the Empire Garage for the Smart Mobility Summit, an annual event put on by Wards Intelligence and C3 Group
The Autonocast, the podcast I co-host with Alex Roy and Ed Niedermeyer, will also be on hand.
9:30 a.m
March 12 at the JW Marriott
The Autonocast and founding general partner of Trucks VC, Reilly Brennan will hold aSXSW podcast panel onautomated vehicle terminology and
other stuff.
3:30 p.m over at the Hilton Austin Downtown, I&ll be moderating a panel Re-inventing the Wheel: Own, Rent, Share, Subscribe
Sherrill Kaplan with Zipcar, Amber Quist, with Silvercar and Russell Lemmer with Dealerware will join me.
TechCrunch is also hosting a SXSW
party from 1 pm to 4 pm Sunday, March 10, 615 Red River St., that will feature musical guest Elderbrook
RSVP here.
Self Racing Cars
Finally, I&ve been in contact with Joshua Schachter who puts on the annual Self Racing Car event, which will
be held March 23 and March 24 at Thunderhill Raceway near Willows, California.
There is still room for participants to test or demo their
autonomous vehicles, drive train innovation, simulation, software, teleoperation, and sensors
Sign up to participate or drop them a line at contact@selfracingcars.com.
Thanks for reading
There might be content you like or something you hate
Feel free toreach out to me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share those thoughts, opinions or tips.
Nos vemos la próxima vez.
