Faster, Smarter, Greener: The Future of the Car and Urban Mobility

Faster, Smarter, Greener

Faster, Smarter, Greener

The Future of the Car and Urban Mobility

Venkat Sumantran, Charles Fine, and David Gonsalvez

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sumantran, V., 1958- author. | Fine, Charles H., author. | Gonsalvez,

David J. A. (David Joseph Anthony), 1956- author.

Title: Faster, smarter, greener : the future of the car and urban mobility /

Venkat Sumantran, Charles Fine, and David Gonsalvez.

Description: Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical

references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017001168 | ISBN 9780262036665 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Transportation, Automotive--Technological innovations. |

Automobiles--Technological innovations. | Automobile industry and

trade--Technological innovations. | Urban transportation--Technological

innovations.

Classification: LCC HE5611 .S86 2017 | DDC 388.3/21--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017001168

EPUB version 1.0

d_r0

To Girija and Ramani

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part I: The World Is Changing

1 A Tale of Two Cities

2 An Urban Century

3 A Softer, Greener Footprint

4 New Attitudes

Part II: The Innovation Response

5 Innovations for Sustainability

6 Innovations to Support Mass Customization

7 Innovations to Stay Always Connected

8 Innovations for Intelligent Cars and Autonomy

9 Innovations and Variations in Traditional Mobility Modes

10 Innovations in Marketplaces

Part III: Implementation of the CHIP Mobility Architecture

11 CHIP Mobility: Framework and Architecture

12 Implementing CHIP Mobility: The Roles of Stakeholders

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Preface

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language

And next year’s words await another voice.

—T. S. Eliot¹

Mobility has served as the lifeblood of human civilization. Over the course of the twentieth century, often referred to as the century of the automobile, cars have moved drivers and riders with a combination of utility, efficiency, and variety, unrivaled in the industrial age. Yet as new cars are welcomed by the millions, the world appears poised on the edge of a new horizon for mobility, one that promises to be faster, smarter, and greener.

This book studies a world that is changing—a world in which people’s values, priorities, demographics, and lifestyles are evolving faster than ever before. The chapters that follow traverse a spectrum of technology, entrepreneurship, social change, and governance that engages the human desire for transformed mobility architecture, and anticipate necessary and desirable changes that society will make to move toward such future-relevant, vibrant, and sustainable mobility.

This book peers into this evolving world of wondrous variety, ingenious innovations, engaging enterprises, and ecologically minded communities and proposes a mobility architecture for the challenges of the times. We propose an architecture that is robust, adaptable, and efficient along with a framework that may serve as a template for societies as they transform and adjust their mobility systems. People’s journeys are seldom limited solely to economic goals—there is joy in traveling across new landscapes. Similarly, our book not only deals with mobility as a topic of vital importance to the global economy, it also offers the reader a window seat from which to observe a rapidly evolving mobility landscape.

The century of the automobile

The automobile has been central to human mobility systems for over a hundred years. From its origins, when horseless carriages required a flagman to walk ahead of each car, the automobile has been responsible for a remarkable evolution in mobility experiences. Automotive production evolved from a cottage industry relying on a small number of craftsmen to becoming arguably the biggest industrial sector of the global economy. Cars have sped past the sound barrier on the ground and have carried astronauts on the moon. And now cars can communicate with each other to avert accidents and even drive themselves in urban traffic.

Along the way, a love affair blossomed between people and cars. Through symbiotic evolution, the auto industry reshaped urban and suburban landscapes and changed how we live, work, and play. For many, the automobile made personal mobility available round-the-clock. And access to efficient mobility has propelled economic development and a better quality of life in many parts of the world. When early humans began to walk upright, a new vantage was gained and bipedal mobility multiplied survival options. Cars afforded humans yet another level of mobility. Cogito ergo zoom is a mantra we have lived by ever since.²

When Peter Drucker, referring to the auto industry, coined the phrase industry of industries, could even he have foreseen how powerful the impact of the automobile would become?³ The raw numbers are staggering. If the auto industry were a country, its annual revenue, exceeding $3.5 trillion, would earn it the number four rank among nations. The industry accounts for more than 50 million employed across the value chain. The global vehicle population registers at more than 1.1 billion, which means there are almost as many cars on Earth today as there were people when the automobile was invented.

Troubled waters

Yet the sheer success and omnipresence of cars have created a new set of problems. In urban areas, which contribute more than 85 percent of global GDP, population densities are crowding out space for automobiles. Congestion is a pain point that sits high on the list of most city administrators. Societies have awoken from a reverie to realize that we have been designing cities for cars when we should have been designing cities for people. Accelerated urbanization in emerging economies and a wave of urban renewal in mature economies are pressuring urban planners to rethink and redesign cityscapes and regulations, sometimes aimed at curbing the use of personal vehicles.

Cars have often been the most efficient and quickest mode for point-to-point travel in cities. This assumption is less frequently true today. For some, escalating cost, congestion, and inconvenience are turning this beloved asset into a liability. As Thoreau reflected, When the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him.⁴ One might say this about many urban car owners.

People’s passion for cars has cooled for other reasons as well. The scale of the human impact on our planet is becoming more evident with each passing decade. The levels of increase in greenhouse gas emissions and depletion of resources are not sustainable. Cars have become cleaner and greener in dramatic fashion. Yet the sheer increase in the global vehicle population means that this progress is insufficient. Governments are restricting profligate development, constraining vehicle designs, and limiting the use of personal cars, which will become increasingly expensive to develop, own, and operate.

Even as the long love affair between people and the driving machine seems to be waning, a new romance is blooming. Smartphones are the new object of love and adoration. Phones have supplanted cars as a portal to social interactions, communication, and entertainment and even as a space for intimacy. The smartphone has changed customer expectations broadly with respect to personalization, connectivity, and information-integrated system technologies by offering a breathtaking new array of possibilities.

Cultural attitudes are changing too. A few decades ago, in many countries, obtaining a driver’s license was a rite of passage for many teenagers. Not anymore. Vehicle ownership, vehicle use, and the number of licensed drivers are all declining in most developed economies. Many young adults are choosing to abandon the suburbs their parents populated and moving to rejuvenated cities with a wide array of bars, cafés, theaters, and restaurants and myriad opportunities for social interaction. Cars rank lower in priority for many of this tribe compared to earlier generations.

A perfect storm

These social changes have whipped up a perfect storm, requiring us to reenvision future mobility.

Even leaders from traditional industry behemoths are speaking with uncharacteristic candor. According to Mark Fields, former CEO of Ford Motor Company, We are on the cusp of a mobility revolution.⁵ Nissan’s Europe chairman, Paul Willcox, adds that automakers are facing a decade of disruption.⁶ Ian Robertson, a board member of BMW and head of BMW’s global sales and marketing functions, cautions that the next ten years are probably going to involve more change and more dynamics than we have seen in the last century.⁷ Analogies with the demise of Kodak and Polaroid, companies that underestimated the disruptiveness of digital imaging, are invoked to assure investors and customers that the auto industry has awoken to the magnitude of changes ahead. Traditional auto companies surely will not give up without a fight, but the challenges they face are formidable. Only the nimble few, who fundamentally redefine their roles and strategies will survive in a very different future mobility landscape.

The track record of human civilization provides hope that individuals and their institutions will adapt. From the onset of the Ice Age through centuries of calamities, famines, and floods, people have evolved and survived. The one sure source of strength and optimism is humankind’s ability to cooperate and innovate to work itself out of tight spots. Technology, innovation, new forms of cooperation, and new business models give us multiple ways to respond.

Innovations to redefine mobility

Heeding society’s alarm at the degradation of our planet’s environment, regulators are pushing automakers to lower carbon emissions and vehicular pollution. In response, automakers have harnessed a range of technologies to address fuel efficiency and tailpipe emissions. Carbon emissions from some concept cars are reaching levels that are a tenth of those released by conventional cars just a decade ago. Other tailpipe emissions have been reduced even more dramatically—to less than 2 percent of the values of emissions spewed by cars from the 1970s. New breeds of electric vehicles promise far greater range, better efficiency, and much lower operating costs while technically meeting zero-emission mandates. Some nations have set forth a vision to achieve zero traffic fatalities on their roads. Sustainability, an imperative increasingly espoused by society, has gained a more central role in driving the development agenda in many industries and communities.

Now connectivity has joined sustainability at the top of the agenda. Whether at home, at work, in the park, or on the streets, innovations in communication have allowed us to be immersed in an ocean of connectivity, data, and analytics, even while we are on the move. Interfaces in smart- phones, smart things, and smart wearables help us summon information, assistance, guidance, services, and even assets. This ubiquitous connectivity provides a path to dramatically improve our transportation experiences and efficiency. Smartphone applications can plan a journey, hail a car, keep people connected while traveling, and pay for the trip through an e-wallet. These modern opportunities are available not only in industrialized economies but also in many emerging economies. China, India, and Indonesia, to name a few, are leapfrogging into a digitized world with astonishing rapidity. Most traditional automakers are responding by turning their cars into mobile connected spaces that can also be personalized. Many technologies from consumer electronics are being integrated into cars and car-related services. Several automakers and their suppliers have unleashed a flurry of apps and mobility solutions suitable for modern customers operating in a digital economy. However, these incumbents face competition from new-age communication behemoths such as Apple, Google’s parent Alphabet, and China’s Tencent, which see a chance to play the role of disruptor by leveraging their platforms to dominate the consumer’s interface with cars and mobility systems.

For the younger generation, dubbed digital natives, connectivity innovations are as natural as the seemingly new sharing economy. The Internet has fostered a newly accessible marketplace for assets, offering consumers a chance to share everything from apartments to garden implements, household appliances, and cars. Modern travelers increasingly prefer to adopt the role of users of services rather than owners of assets. For many of the connected netizens in emerging markets, stepping straight into the user role with Uber or Didi or Grab may be the most natural path to improved mobility, bypassing both the owner role and the driver role. And for those occasions when use of a car is critical, local short-term car rentals offer a solution in the form of a rental billed by the minute, where you want it, when you want it, all handled through the smartphone. In the use, don’t own realm, traditional automakers are not standing still. Many have acquired significant stakes in customer-facing startups such as taxi alternatives and peer-to-peer car-sharing and vanpooling services. In a wide-open marketplace, other mobility stakeholders, including rail and transit operators, have also attempted to enter with a range of urban mobility solutions.

Such a variety of options, provided in a mode of mass customization, has come to be expected by today’s consumers. To provide this mass customization, companies must leverage big data and analytics to extract granular information about customers and options, supply and demand. Advances in the industrial Internet allow products and services to be configured, one at a time, to individually serve customers who expect and will pay for customization and personalization in travel services. Intelligent personal advisers in the form of apps that harness web-crawling bots can likewise sift through a multitude of possibilities to craft an individualized travel itinerary, even if the destination is nothing more than a new eatery across town.

And just around the corner is the age of self-driving cars. Prototypes have gained maturity remarkably quickly over the past decade. As vehicles become better able to drive themselves, the technology promises to allow drivers to become passengers and free up their time for alternative productive uses. Here too, new entrants—interlopers, to some—such as Tesla’s electric vehicles with their Autopilot functions and Google’s self-driving podcar, are provoking shifts in R&D investment and priorities among traditional automakers the world over. Shedding their traditional wariness of wading into domains that pose high liability risk, numerous automakers also have set their sights on the holy grail of full autonomy with aggressive investments and acquisitions. Always connected, self-driving cars have gone from science fiction to roving prototypes in a mere decade. Summoning and using a car in the near future may come to resemble the way we summon and use an elevator. The transition to driverless cars may be as profound as the shift modern society made when it switched to the horseless carriage.

Yet all technological progress comes packaged with new challenges. As George Bernard Shaw observed, Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.⁸ Technology has sometimes widened the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. Mobility is a vital activity, and societies need to ensure that access to it is not beyond the reach of any demographic segment of society. Some of society’s investments in mobility infrastructure can be quickly rendered obsolete, so careful planning and execution are necessary. And the all-digital world has brought new awareness of the risks of cyber intrusions, for data theft, and hacking via a connected auto can be more threatening than traditional Grand Theft Auto. Thus, future mobility architectures need to safeguard many societal imperatives.

Re-envisioning mobility

These innovations, nurtured in a rich but sometimes chaotic entrepreneurial ecosystem, will drive migration to a new and better era of mobility, as long as the appropriate government actors—national, regional, and local—complement privately funded initiatives with enlightened oversight and intelligent public investment. Along the way, the discourse must shift from cars to mobility. That is, a wider range of actors, public and private, complementing the automakers, will provide mobility components and solutions. No single entity will be able to provide an end-to-end mobility system, so collaboration and integration will be essential to offer a seamless service to consumers.

Urban society will look beyond cars to a broader range of options. This shift will require mobility users to be open to multiple modes. Walking, bicycling, ride sharing, and taking public transit such as buses, subways, and trains are all valuable complements to individual driving, each with its own merits and purpose. We can expect a blurring of the divide among public, personal, and shared modes of transit.

As exciting as these innovative products and services will be, perhaps the greatest opportunities for dramatically changing the ecology of transportation are expected to come in the realm of integration and coordination. Just as the toughest filament of carbon fiber is of little use without the resin matrix in which it is embedded, transportation modes need to be effectively linked.

Our approach to comprehending this future is determinedly holistic. Discrete but connected solutions offer better opportunities to deliver superior results for complex user needs. A multisolution mobility landscape will open up, with two simple goals—to delight the customer and to align with societal priorities. Toward this end, a society leveraging dynamic entrepreneurship will access a full spectrum of technologies, business models, and transport modes. These options will span a range of economic value propositions so that low-cost modes will coexist with premium and exclusive modes. Personal mobility devices such as cars, bicycles, and microcars will coexist with buses and metro transit systems. The quickest path between two points may involve a drive by car to a metro station, then travel by mass transit to a city center, followed by the use of a shared bicycle for the last mile. Uber, Zipcar, Sidecar, Turo, Car2Go, BlaBlaCar, Grabtaxi, Velib, Boris Bikes—personal urban transportation is acquiring a whole new vocabulary. Urban mobility experiences will become increasingly heterogeneous. A multiplicity of innovative modes suitable for various purses and contexts will compete to lure travelers with their speed, economics, and convenience. Each mode or combination of modes will be characterized by its signature for cost, availability, environmental impact, and time efficiency. Around the world, sustained investment in physical infrastructure and digital infrastructures, augmented by the world of smart devices and handheld apps, has given a huge boost to connecting these diverse modes of transportation.

For individual journeys, consumers will rely on intelligent advisers in the forms of apps residing in or accessible through their smartphones, wearable digital devices, or built into their cars, with up-to-date analytics that can recommend personalized, profile-specific travel choices and routes. Mobility as a service (MaaS) is a paradigm that captures the essence of use-as-needed systems, providing the potential for more efficient use of resources and capital. Various assets for mobility need not be owned, yet they will be made available for use as needed by consumers. In such well-managed systems, asset utilization can be high, and mass customization can tailor transport solutions to suit specific communities and individuals.

Adjusting societal focus from cars to mobility also leads to another important transformation in thinking. An earlier generation believed that roads and infrastructure should be paid for by general fund taxes, including taxes on fuels. However, to encourage behaviors that are consistent with the need to limit pollution and congestion, targeted user fees, taxes, and subsidies—for roads, bridges, cars, buses, trains, parking spaces, and even urban access—will be needed to help shape the use of mobility services and the use of assets and infrastructure. Such pricing mechanisms will further influence consumers’ choices of modes, travel patterns, and investments in cars, bicycles, and housing, for example. If designed well, these new mechanisms should influence travelers to choose modes aligned with societal priorities.

Society, through its arms of governments, regulators, and city administrators will have to join automakers, entrepreneurs, and technologists to craft this far more comprehensive mobility map. Societies need convenient, user-friendly mobility for people and goods. We need clean air and safe roads. We also need productive organizations that can provide jobs and economic development. And we need a planet that can continue to sustain and nourish life as we know it.

The CHIP mobility architecture

Future society will demand connected, heterogeneous, intelligent, and personalized (CHIP) mobility. CHIP mobility for a digitally powered society will be logical and efficient. This future preserves the freedom of personal choice, even as it upholds fairness. Those who use more assets and resources, including urban road and parking space, will be expected to pay more. Customers can enjoy flexibility and variety even as society ensures sustainability and urban harmony. Mobility where I want it, when I want it, uniquely fitting my budget and my context—this is the expectation of customers and society. CHIP mobility serves this expectation.

This vision provides a sustainable future course for mobility to help humanity continue its journey toward a better quality of life. Mobility has not only been the grease that sped economic development, it has also been the spice that added flavor to our lives, making them fuller and richer. The next generation deserves an exciting future, but also a sustainable one.

Recognizing the great diversity of conditions and needs across the world, we envision CHIP mobility as an architecture that is adaptable for a range of environments. Global context varies not only from continent to continent but also from cities to suburbs. Local cultures and lifestyles will predispose societies to prefer certain solutions. Democracy and freedom have emphasized the importance of individual choice and expression. To ignore this would be imprudent. We examine the building blocks of mobility that are advancing, boosted by technology, regulations, and customer preferences. We review the novel ways in which these building blocks are juxtaposed and connected to deliver mobility solutions applicable to different priorities. From this analysis we offer guidelines as to how the CHIP architecture may be adapted and the prerequisites for strategic success.

Innovative mobility solutions are a social and economic necessity that must transcend traditional industry boundaries. These solutions must align with national and global goals for sustainability and still cater to individual needs. This mandate is a tall order. Getting to this future state, will require us to discard many of the assumptions that underpin current mobility. The traditional auto industry is unlikely to enjoy the dominant role it played for the last generation. Governments and city administrations must play a constructive, collaborative role to enable CHIP mobility. They will be joined by a range of new-generation entrepreneurs and investors such as Google, Apple, Uber, and Tencent, technology startups, and app developers, all of which have visions of being the disruptor and redefining future mobility.

We make no attempt to offer simple prescriptive recommendations. We cannot expect such a future to arrive gift-wrapped, all in one bundle. In our view there is no perfect solution under these conditions. Rather, CHIP mobility will evolve through the messy processes of capitalism and democracy, often tinged with disruption and, regrettably, sometimes corruption. After all, any road to the future is bound to have a few construction zones along the way. We expect much trial and error—and much political wrangling—as societies move toward a more sustainable future.

We anticipate a period of heightened experimentation, mimicking the process undergone by biological systems, during which industries, entrepreneurs, and governments explore a multiplicity of combinations, constructed from an ever-expanding set of building blocks. Fluid adaptations across time and geography are a characteristic of many life forms. As such, we do not expect a single winner mobility model. Rather, we expect continued differentiation and variation—genetic mutations—across travel modes, business models, and evolving regulations.

As Darwin noted, It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.⁹ The CHIP mobility architecture is a model for a flexible, responsive mobility ecosystem that can evolve and adapt to a wide variety of domains and challenges. As such, we believe it is an architecture that Darwin would have been delighted to observe and citizen travelers will find pleasing to their needs.

About this book

The scope of the book is deliberately limited to human mobility. We have refrained from extending the discussion to the world of freight and logistics, even though there are many topics of overlapping interest and relevance.

The bulk of our discussion is oriented toward the urban context. Noting that a lot of commuting also occurs across the city-suburb boundary, we address several solutions that are relevant to these commuters. We concede that huge changes are under way in rural manifestations of mobility as well. But the preponderance of economic activity and population concentrations in urban locales led us to pay greater attention to these domains. Further, we believe that many of the technological advances, such as vehicle connectivity and autonomy, as well as business solutions, such as car sharing, will be driven by innovators and demand in the urban context, though they will eventually have an impact in rural areas as well.

Although our research and coverage are heavily dependent on the mobility patterns and technologies being deployed in postindustrial developed economies, we also take note of many important innovations occurring outside these regions—affordable mobility in India, electric vehicles in China, and motorcycle taxis in Southeast Asia, for example. We observe the dichotomy of the industrialized and emerging economies from several angles. First, some of the interesting entrepreneurs (Google, Uber, BlaBlaCar) have developed their innovations in the industrialized world, but their ideas are rapidly being spun (by numerous players) across a very broad global landscape. Second, the industrialized economies have plunged deep into a pattern of mobility that is worryingly unsustainable. We hope the lessons learned here may help deflect emerging economies from such a trajectory while motorization is still low, to avoid future expensive remediation. Along the way, we hope the successful examples of transforming urban mobility, such as we see in London, Hong Kong, and Singapore, may be emulated in cities like Mumbai or São Paulo. In all cases, we seek to identify sustainable solutions that can be customized to the needs of the wide variety of landscapes across the globe.

The book is organized into three parts:

In part I we review the contours of the world that are changing all around us and stimulating the need to transform existing mobility systems. Accelerated urbanization, growing concern for the environment, and continuously evolving cultural attitudes will require our future mobility architecture to be different.

In part II we examine humans’ irrepressible instinct to innovate and find solutions to mobility challenges. Innovative responses can leverage the digitized economy, lead to a variety of greener and more personalized solutions, and improve our products and services. They form the building blocks of the CHIP mobility architecture.

In part III we synthesize the CHIP mobility architecture and outline a framework to identify stakeholder roles required to realize society’s vision for faster, smarter, and greener mobility.

Throughout, we have endeavored to include numerous external viewpoints to complement our own. These inputs, some of which are presented in boxes, have widened the range of perspectives we bring to the discussion. They help refine and amplify the many takeaways presented in the chapters.

This book takes on a core challenge of our age. How can we shape the trajectory of mobility so that it becomes sustainable? What is the role of the traditional automotive companies? What is the role of the Internet generation entrepreneurs? What is the role of government? How should rules be written to support this new future? How can they be enforced? Who will pay for them? How can society’s mobility expectations be addressed?

If you are drawn to these questions, we are confident that the chapters ahead will unfold a tapestry that analyzes the challenges and proposes solutions to the above.

Come, take us for a test ride!

Acknowledgments

This book is the outcome of three independent but intertwined journeys. Our respective careers have afforded us a certain breadth and depth of exposure to the automotive and associated industries accumulated over three-plus decades. Tracing the evolution of our society and its perspectives, our engagement has gradually morphed from being very auto-focused to embracing the full diversity of tools and solutions that aid human mobility today. Effort specifically dedicated to this book was spread over three years, during which time we have been very fortunate to broaden our perspectives through interactions with a large number of people with varied backgrounds who have contributed in a variety of ways to help us shape and present the ideas we offer. Our approach has required us not only to look at future mobility but also the key factors that will shape it. As a result, we had sought out counsel, perspectives, and experiences not only from people connected with mobility but also many who had little to do with the subject professionally—a list that includes sociologists, futurists, and urban planners. Their opinions too have enriched the contents of this book.

A number of people remained close to this project through its evolution, and our discussions with them proved invaluable. We are especially grateful to Venkatesh Prasad, Richard Spitzer, Nagi Palle, Jim Womack, Kasturi Venugopal, and Jay Parikh for their intelligent and thought-provoking debates as we shaped the ideas presented here.

The auto industry itself is a deep source of experience, and we benefited from the insights of several industry leaders, including Carlos Ghosn, Rick Wagoner, Bob Lutz, Carlos Tavares, Anand Mahindra, Andy Palmer, Bernd Bohr, Mark Reuss, Don Runkle, and Mark Schulz. Thanks are also due to Larry Burns, Carl-Peter Forster, Klaus Entenmann, Christoph Grote, Johann DeNysschen, and Phil Murtaugh. The Society of Automotive Engineers has been a leading platform for global mobility practitioners, and we similarly benefited from extensive discussions with three of their past presidents, Dan Hancock, Andy Brown, and Cuneyt Oge. Many senior executives in the auto industry also devoted time to debating ideas with us, and we are thankful to Bill Jordan, Dave Vanderveen, Dirk Lembregts, Bob Inman, and Jon Owen for their support.

The industry has long depended on a number of experts in specific technical domains who anticipate trends and shape future technologies. We gained valuable insights from Bernard Charles, Helmut List, Stephan Pischinger, and George Gillespie.

Our book highlights some topics in boxes. We are grateful to Wolfgang Bernhart, Wilfried Aulbur, John Hagel, Sarwant Singh, Martyn Briggs, Gary Silberg, Andrew Savarie, Don Devereaux, Donna Miller, Divya Venugopal, Phil Gott, and Egil Juliussen for their valuable contributions to this material.

S. Ramadorai, Rodney Brooks, Robin Chase, Amory Lovins, Marina Gorbis, Geoff Wardle, Gopal Srinivasan, and Lakshmi Narayan, each in their own way, have been peering into the future of human society. We thank them for the insights they readily shared with us.

Much of the technology in the mobility industry has flowed from suppliers, and their perspectives have also been important. We are thankful to Dirk Hoheisel, Michael Ruf, Jeff Owens, and Jean Brunol for sharing their outlook from this vantage. At the same time, the book has identified an important role that will be played by a new genre of technologists and suppliers, many of whom originate from Silicon Valley. We acknowledge the assistance of Kent Helfrich, Marty McEnroe, Kerry Champion, Marty Thall, and Avneesh Agrawal.

Mobility is a domain that is home to a number of highly experienced analysts and consultants, and our discussions with many of them are deeply appreciated. They include David Andrea, Prakash Krishnaswamy, Chris Borroni-Bird, Tim Armstrong, Murli Iyer, Gary Lapidus, Rainer Scholz, Rakesh Batra, Thomas Schmelzer, Frank Haertl, Marco Hecker, Anantha Krishnan, Sean McAlinden, Jay Baron, Mahender Singh, Amy Mills, Anne Asensio, Monica Menghini, Stephen Dyer, Jian Sun, and Sven Beiker. Karl Ludvigsen is an old friend, prolific author, and industry insider whose delightful anecdotes and deep insights we treasure.

We have had access to corporate information through many official sources, including Wieland Bruch and Michael Fischer (BMW), James Ryan and Nada Filipovich (Daimler), Mark Gilles (Volkswagen), Simon Sproule (previously at Tesla), Stephen Lynn (Catapult), , Zhaoming Chua (EasyMile), Michael Austin (BYD), Christy Petty (Gartner), Nashwa Naushad and Shreya Gadepalli (ITDP), Jana Hartline (Toyota), Katelyn Chesley (Zipcar), and Larry Kinsel and Kathy Adelson (General Motors).

The perspectives of regulators, governments, and think tanks have contributed to some of the balance the book has sought to deliver. We are grateful to Margo Oge, Sue Zielinski, Komal Anand, Clayton Lane, Walter Hook, and Rachel Tang.

Throughout the course of the book, we have sought to present the thesis with rigor. We were helped in this effort by input from a number of talented academics, including Yossi Sheffi, Erik Brynjolfsson, Venkat Ramaswamy, Bhaskar Ramamurthy, Stefan Bratzel, Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer, Uwe Clausen, and Dieter Rombach. Among students, we acknowledge the assistance of Nachiket Joshi.

In academia, the size of one’s intellectual debts can often be a measure of wealth. By that metric, Charlie Fine is grateful indeed for the tall stack of IOUs he has accumulated. His dissertation committee at Stanford, David Kreps, Evan Porteus, and Steven Wheelwright, supported his exploration of the Toyota manufacturing phenomenon, which shaped his earliest understandings of the modern automotive industry. At MIT, Dan Roos nurtured the International Motor Vehicle Program, which enabled Charlie to learn with and from a powerful collection of mentors and colleagues, including Dan Whitney, Takahiro Fujimoto, Kim Clark, John Paul MacDuffie, Susan Helper, Fritz Pil, Mari Sako, Andrew Graves, and Koichi Shimokawa. Former students in MIT’s LFM/LGO program, Milo Werner and Doug Field generously shared their insights regarding the challenges and successes faced by Tesla Motors, and led to a case co-authored with Milo, Don Rosenfield, and Loredana Padurean.

Fine-tuning the content and narrative benefited from the generous time and effort expended by Sampath Kumar, Thomas Abraham, Sathya Prasad, and Sundaram Parthasarathy. Sathiyaseelan Gangasalam, an accomplished industrial designer, lent his keen understanding to an exquisite rendering of the book’s cover image.

The considerable task of preparing the manuscript would not have been possible without the efficient assistance of Saurabh Jain and Priya Rao. At the MIT Press we are grateful to Emily Taber, Deborah Cantor-Adams, Marjorie Pannell, and Katie Hope for enthusiastically and efficiently steering the manuscript through the production and marketing processes.

Last but most important, at all times we have been buoyed by the support, strength, and encouragement of our spouses, Venil Sumantran, Wendy Fine, and Maria Aguerri Gomez. Not only had they indulged our three years of effort on this book, they have helped us sharpen many of our ideas and discussion through curious and challenging debates.

I The World Is Changing

Part I opens with a review of two large and thriving metropolises that have evolved in two very different sets of conditions and shaped by very different policies. They represent two divergent trajectories that are supported by very different mobility architectures. Their destinies to date have been largely influenced by their mobility framework, illustrating the relationship between policies and investment and their eventual outcomes.

In chapters 2 through 4 we turn to the role played by urbanization and population densification in determining suitable transportation options. We evaluate how these options affect the resulting environmental footprint. For baby boomers, cars have been central to mobility; to a digital native, mobility has a wider range of connotations. We assess how changing cultural values and priorities will alter society’s expectations of future mobility.

These chapters help identify key requirements for the CHIP—connected, heterogeneous, integrated, and personalized—mobility architecture, which are then explored in more depth in subsequent chapters of the book.

1 A Tale of Two Cities

We are our choices.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

Los Angeles, the city of Angels

On March 16, 2016, the headline in the Los Angeles Times blared: Los Angeles area can claim the worst traffic in America. Again.¹ Commuters on Interstate 101 spent