With today’s episode, we kick off a miniseries on “mobility.” In today’s tech parlance and in city planning parlance, mobility includes a bunch of different issues, but they have one thing in common: they shape the quality of our everyday lives. How we get to work, to school or to our friends’ house can make the difference between a pleasant daily city experience and a barely tolerable one. And one way or another, it’s going to change because of technology. So the “Mobility” umbrella covers lots of things, including autonomous vehicles (AVs), but actually we're not covering those directly in this mobility miniseries. But artificial intelligence plays a role in other parts of mobility, like, for example, fleet management, for which you can imagine optimization algorithms would be crucial. The company we discuss on today's episode is called Fleetonomy, and they are building fleet management systems specifically with autonomy in mind. Fleetonomy’s offering is designed to maximize vehicle utilization, which is the key to fleet management. It does this by leveraging data from the car itself, from the fleet owner’s data, and multiple public sources, and then layering on machine learning algorithms.
Fleet management is part of that landscape of mobility, but both the domain and that word include other forms of getting around. Mobility includes e-scooters, ride shares,bike shares, electric vehicles and their charging stations, traffic management, road congestion pricing, and more. In addition to Fleetonomy, this miniseries will include Waycare, a traffic management company, and MaaS Global, makers of Whim, the first mobility-as-a-service provider. When you put all these together, you can begin to envision a really different transportation future, one in which how we move around, when, with whom, in what mode, and maybe even to where, can be dramatically different. Given how crucial mobility is to economic activity, this sector’s transformations can really reverberate widely.
Once we’ve aired all three episodes, Marco and I will add a brief post-game conversation discussing mobility and the three companies together. We hope you enjoy and thanks for being curious.
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