The Autonomy Journals
The Autonomy Journals showcase leading voices, sharing insights, learnings, lessons and perhaps some confessions from the Autonomy Journey in transport and mobility.
SAMS, a private, non-profit innovation cluster for sustainable, autonomous mobility solutions, host the podcast.
The Autonomy Journals
Navigating Shortcuts with Halvor Vislie from HYKE: How Ferries Can Transform City Mobility
Imagine your urban commute transformed - not by more roads or tunnels, but by rediscovering the original transportation network beneath our noses. The waterways that birthed civilization are making a comeback.
On this episode of Autonomy Journals, we're joined by Halvor Vislie, CEO of HYKE. HYKE is revolutionizing urban mobility with sleek electric ferries that turn congested commutes into enjoyable experiences. "If riding the ferry is cooler than driving a car," Halvor notes, "you know you've achieved something."
Discover how a single 50-seat ferry can replace five city buses on certain routes, cutting travel times by 80% and reducing environmental impact. We explore the fascinating history of how water transportation was gradually pushed aside by roads and bridges, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that ferries must be expensive and inefficient.
HYKE's approach challenges every assumption about maritime transportation. Their vessels use 50% less energy than traditional ferries, allowing all-day operation without complex charging infrastructure. With large windows and a low profile close to the water, they've created an experience that feels "like the showroom for an upscale car brand."
Beyond the technology, we explore the urban planning implications of ferry services - from creating shortcuts across water bodies to alleviating congestion at bridges and river crossings. These vessels offer immediate transportation solutions for real estate developers and city planners without massive infrastructure investments.
As HYKE gradually incorporates autonomous technologies, it's taking a pragmatic approach that prioritizes passenger safety and acceptance. The result is a practical and genuinely desirable transportation option, proving that sometimes the best innovation involves rediscovering what we once knew.
Innovation Norway sponsors this episode.
The Autonomy Journals showcase leading voices, sharing insights, learnings, lessons and perhaps some confessions from the Autonomy Journey in transport and mobility.
Subscribe to the Autonomy Journals and join us next time as we continue exploring how Norway leads the way in autonomous mobility solutions. Because in Norway, we do it.
SAMS is a private, non-profit innovation cluster for sustainable, autonomous mobility solutions and the host of the podcast.
If riding the ferry is cooler than driving a car, you know you've achieved something.
Arild Tjomsland:Hello and welcome to the Autonomy Journals podcast brought to you by SAMS, the Norwegian Innovation Cluster for Autonomous Mobility and Transport Systems. Autonomy In Norway we do it. We are your hosts, Eja and Arild.
Eja Tuominen:I'm leading the Norwegian Innovation Cluster for Sustainable Autonomous Mobility Systems.
Arild Tjomsland:And I'm the founder of a small company in the mobility space, Kobla.
Eja Tuominen:The Autonomy Journals is aimed at inviting you into the autonomous universe of new ideas, innovation, great progress and feedback.
Arild Tjomsland:Translating visions and complexities, one interesting conversation at a time, and we'll offer links and resources to autonomy sites and news in the credits.
Eja Tuominen:The Autonomy Journals is sponsored by the Maritime Export Office at Innovation Norway.
Arild Tjomsland:Welcome to the Autonomy Journals. Today, our guest is Halvor Vislie CEO, of HYKE. Welcome, Halvor. Our paths have crossed once in a while. I haven't heard you talk about HYKE before and not about your journey into this business, so why don't you tell me what sparked your interest in autonomy?
Halvor Vislie:It's not necessarily an interest in autonomy for the sake of autonomy. I think it is autonomy as part of something bigger, as a way to do things differently, which is something that typically sparks my interest. In whatever I've done in my career, it's not necessarily this one piece of it that says okay, wow, this is what we've been waiting for. I t's bigger than that. In the case of HYKE, what sparked my interest was the whole concept of, you know, putting a modern touch to something that historically not only you know was a widespread solution and a widespread approach to transportation. It was the only approach to transportation, right? Especially in Norway, but actually on a worldwide basis. Most cities are located on water, and I think there's a very good reason why that's the case. It's because that's the way we used to do things when it comes to transportation. That's the reason why.
Halvor Vislie:You know, we put a settlement here and we can transport stuff in and out, and that was done by water and somehow, over the last you know hundreds or even thousands of years, we kind of forgot about it, where we, you know, gradually we take more and more advanced steps towards avoiding water and I think from a transportation perspective, that's very much the case Over time. Water and transporting stuff on water, not obviously not on a global scale, because the oceans are the oceans, right, but more on a local scale,
Halvor Vislie:You know, we build enormous bridges, we dig tunnels and they're super expensive, they're really hard to do, they're rough on nature and once you've done, them there's no going back. Exactly exactly, and the whole sort of fascination with roads and bridges and tunnels and this advanced engineering and you know, somehow, you know that just kind of pushed, you know, ferries and transportation and water, like right to the back of the class right.
Halvor Vislie:And so we don't really want to talk about ferries because they're expensive. And obviously that's a self-fulfilling prophecy the fewer you build of something, the more expensive they're going to get. And so it was really sort of this negative spiral. I think over time. That sort of a ferries bad rep in a way. They did become really expensive, and the carbon footprint from ferries traditional diesel ferries compared to to diesel bus, is terrible yeah, right so so as as that wave sort of starting and started entering the discussion, then obviously ferries got an even worse rap right.
Halvor Vislie:It's like, well, you know, let's not do that. In many ways that gave ferries sort of a position of being the last resort, like you can't build a bridge, you can't dig a tunnel, you can't, you know, you can't go around. Okay, let's build a boat. And then you build one and you make it purpose-built and you engineer it from scratch and of course it's going to be expensive, you know, I think think about it. When you want to buy a bus, you don't. You don't sit down and design one, you know, you round up just for one city, you buy one right.
Halvor Vislie:that's not possible in the maritime world. You know, you, you design it from scratch and say that I need exactly 284 seats on this boat and it needs to travel at eight and a half knots, and it needs to. You know, and, and it's purpose built, whereas the question is, should it? You can make the same argument with the bus route, right? I said well, you know, we have slightly more passenger on this particular route, so really we shouldn't go for 50 seats, we should go for 60. You would never sit down and design a bus, no, from scratch, no never.
Halvor Vislie:But you do that with ferries.
Arild Tjomsland:With ferries. That's the way it's been done traditionally with ferries. Yeah, because we do have a lot of ferries in Norway, but they're really beloved, maybe in all the islands that have their only means of connection to the mainland the ferries but they've been gradually pushed out of more cities and more densely populated areas, of course.
Halvor Vislie:For good reason, you know, because they are traditional, ferries are not very environmentally friendly.
Arild Tjomsland:Nope. What kind of routes, what kind of areas would a ferry work? Well, what should we look for in our own cities, in our own countries, as ideal locations to use ferries instead of other means?
Halvor Vislie:Where can you find the shortcut? One example that I like to use is back and forth to Bydøy Næs from Oslo city center. If you're going to go around on really bad roads by the way, the local roads on Bygdøy are terrible and they're hard to fix right. But that sort of stretch from, say, sort of the cluster of museums at Bygdøy and around to Tjuvholmen is a little more than five kilometers driving.
Arild Tjomsland:There's a lot of traffic on that five kilometers.
Halvor Vislie:Exactly so. A there's a shortcut, you can just travel shorter. B there's congestion on the roads, so that particular route typically takes around 30 minutes. The same stretch is six minutes by boat. The consequence of that is, if you look at how many people you can transport per hour, essentially one 50-seat ferry would be able to carry as many passengers as five city buses in that hour.
Halvor Vislie:Right, right, wow, if you sort of do the same math with a car you're looking at. Of course, the car travels faster because it doesn't need to stop all the time, but you're replacing like 170 cars or something like that.
Halvor Vislie:And that's one ferry and you start looking at it that way, then obviously you know the climate impact of using a ferry is obvious, of using a ferry is obvious and it's immediate because it doesn't require any infrastructure that's not already there, right? So you're looking at immediate carbon footprint reductions, but you're actually also looking at financial savings, because you're operating one boat where you would drive five buses. That's one element. The other one is obviously looking at five buses. where the distance is not necessarily that much shorter, but you're replacing or you're adding a means of transportation that can operate without congestion. So you would look at areas where traffic typically is at a standstill Around the world. Where does that happen? Most frequently? it's on and off bridges.
Halvor Vislie:That's always where the bottleneck is. Yeah, crossing rivers is always a bottleneck.
Arild Tjomsland:Always, you live on the other side of a river, of course, for some reason.
Halvor Vislie:Murphy's Law right.
Halvor Vislie:Right. So that's another obvious use case is essentially just being able to make it easier for everyone and avoid congestion. A nd in doing so, you're actually also alleviating congestion, right.
Halvor Vislie:Because you're using the water, so it's better for everyone else. E xactly. And then the third is looking at where there's a lot of foot traffic in, say, an area, and again Oslo is a good example. We have in Oslo a little bit of a special situation where the central business district is really two central business districts. You have the sort of the Vika area with Aker Brygge and Tjuvholmen, and then, you have Barcode and getting from one place to another takes a bit of time.
Halvor Vislie:Right, because it involves walking down to public transport and then you need to ride on the tram or the subway or whatever and then you need to walk again. And that's a third place where I think you know ferries have a really good place in the market because it gets people to where they're going faster and actually more reliably. Right, because you're operating on infrastructure in our case water that is completely uncongested. So you say that that's going to take 10 minutes. It's going to take 10 minutes. There's not going to be like a signal error at right Skøyen station which all of a sudden they halt.
Arild Tjomsland:and I guess it would work well with uh, together with the oslo's ambitious car freeze and central area strategy. Because I mean you couldn't even get a taxi or do anything like that for between in that area. So where are you currently operating or what are your prospects around the world? What's like where can we see a HYKE ferry?
Halvor Vislie:Everywhere.
Arild Tjomsland:Everywhere, everywhere, all right, eventually hopefully.
Halvor Vislie:So right now, if you want to ride on a HYKE ferry, you can do so in Fredrikstad. We have been operating in Fredrikstad for about a year. It's been an invaluable experience for us. Fredrikstad is arguably the only place in Norway where ferries have a place in the public mobility network, a natural place.
Arild Tjomsland:So in Fredrikstad the concept is not a novelty right , the concept of using ferries as a part of your everyday mobility is not a new thing, but you get to test out your technology in a place where there is an expectation that it will always work, because it's part of their everyday life.
Halvor Vislie:Absolutely. It's been hard, but've also been operating on arguably the hardest river crossing in Fredrikstad Really harsh weather sometimes, lots of currents, lots of swells coming in from the ocean, having the ability to be operating side by side by an existing route where the passengers expect it to run, having that sort of demand on our shoulders as to we kind of have to deliver on this .
Arild Tjomsland:I've been aboard a high carry and I did love it . What are your design philosophies?
Halvor Vislie:First of all, we wanted to address the fundamental problem that we see in the maritime industry, which is which is one-off built and designing things from scratch.
Halvor Vislie:we wanted something that could be produced in numbers and sort of serial production and reap the benefits of scale. As we get to that, the experience needed to be very different from what you normally associate with riding on a ferry. With electric ferries you get a few things for free, right? Because it no longer smells, it doesn't make much sound, vibration is mostly gone, but we wanted to enhance that. So we have really large windows. It's open, it's airy, it sits low on the water, so you're connected to the water in many ways that you wouldn't normally get on a , traditional vessel. It gives you a sense of walking on water. It's a few minutes of peace.
Halvor Vislie:The biggest challenge for us that we set for ourselves was energy efficiency. We wanted our vessel to be the most energy efficient passenger ferry on the market. It's a little bit like oh wow, yeah, you'll save some money on electricity and yeah, sure, you'll save some money on electricity, but it's not a lot. We're talking about potentially a few hundred thousand NOK a year that you can save by just using less and the grand scheme of things. Unfortunately, that's not a lot, but it has a very, very cool benefit you no longer have to think about intraday charging. So on a normal battery pack, you can now operate a full day without charging. So on a normal battery pack, you can now operate a full day without charging.
Halvor Vislie:You remove all the complexity that's normally associated to electric ferries. That okay. So we need like really fancy charging infrastructure and that sits over here, and then we need another five minutes in the middle of the day so we can do a little bit of trickle charging and then go on and it gets tricky right. You're talking about essentially the same type of operation that you would with the diesel ferry, and that was really critical for us to achieve that, and we did so. Our vessel uses about 50% of the energy compared to the vessels, the existing traditional design vessels in Fredrikstad. We're really proud of that.
Arild Tjomsland:Yeah, I'm sure Good, good, good. Tell me a little bit about your customer base, what they're thinking when they're, when they're evaluating whether they should have a ferry service, if they should risk trying something new, which is your product here. Ferry route could potentially unlock different uh, a different viewpoint towards urban development, right?
Halvor Vislie:We've spent here, right? Traditionally it's a bus, in a way. It has a keel instead of wheels, but in terms of size it's a bus. It still operates in urban areas and so the first thought would be OK, it needs going to, you know, it needs to be operated inside the public mobility network and all of that. But that's a complicated market to penetrate because it takes time and there are a lot of long-term public tenders and we need to respect that and we need to sort of adapt to that.
Halvor Vislie:I think, having an expectation that hey, we are HYKE and you know we're a total of 15 employees and we're going to revolutionize the whole way of public transportation. That's fine to say, but changing that it just takes time. The next question is okay, so who are then your customers that you can talk to today? And the real estate market is indeed probably the biggest if you look at our customer base today and the people we talk to, because they see that it just adds something to their new development that sits right in the water and is beautifully located, but it has a terrible road.
Arild Tjomsland:Right. Existing infrastructure doesn't have the capacity to take the amount of new people, right? So then you have to offer something else, and this could be a very good way to do that
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Well, I ride the bus or I ride the ferry. Well, cool is extremely important
Arild Tjomsland:I mean, I took the bus this morning and you said that your ferry is just a bus with a keel. No, it's not just a bus with a keel.
Arild Tjomsland:Thank you for saying that, because it feels more like the showroom for an upscale car brand on the water. We're not taking into consideration the incredible amount of marketing that car brands do and the wonderful design that they make and the whole world they create is so desirable. , I feel that hike ferries is one of the few ways of sort of getting at that. So how are you on the um? On the um, whole autonomous technology track.
Halvor Vislie:For us, it's very much about understanding what do our customers need? Where do we add real value? If you had the choice between saying, okay, we can either run this manually or traditionally with a captain, or we can run it autonomously, and the difference in cost per year is two million kroners, it's two million kroners cheaper per year to operate autonomously. And then the customer could say okay, so what do we lose? We reduce our cost, but are people going to feel uncomfortable?
Halvor Vislie:Are we going to get less customers, are we going to run into other problems that end up costing us stuff? And so that's one element of it. And the other element of it is saying, you know, it's just from sort of our perspective and offering this product. If we had that case where the customers could choose between saying, okay, we want manual or we want autonomous, then it would be very easy for us to say, well, you know, you can, by running autonomously you can save $2 million a year and the technology costs one. So your net savings is, you know, so it's easier to price. Where we are right now we are asking the customers to carry an extra cost. So we say, oh, it has this autonomous ready, cool technology, right, so you can do all that and it's only going to cost you an extra million.
Halvor Vislie:And let's face it, running ferries is not a super profitable thing to do. And we have taken a very practical approach, sure. So we have started with essentially saying, okay, what does our vessel need? We've created a very different hull that operates really, really efficiently and uses very little energy, but it needs a computer. And so that has been a very sort of basic starting point for us when it comes to adding technology, it is simply the fact that you know whoever drives it whether that's a computer or it is a sort of an autonomous system or a captain it actually needs some computer assistance, right, right, just to make sure that it behaves in the way that you would normally expect a vessel to behave.
Halvor Vislie:Yeah, next step is looking at okay, so how can we enhance? You know, now that we have a computer connected to everything, how can we enhance that? By adding safety. And safety in our case is essentially two things. One is just damage control and just making sure that it's easier for the captains to do their jobs. These captains typically work anywhere from 8 to 12 to maybe even 14 hours a day.
Arild Tjomsland:Wow.
Halvor Vislie:And they will dock the ferry 4 to 6, maybe 8 times an hour. That's a lot of docking, and docking is the hardest thing you do, right?
Halvor Vislie:So imagine you're at the end of a 12-hour shift and you docking the, the ferry for the umpteenth time right, right, and you're like you know, you're a little bit tired and you're a little bit and it gets a little bit a couple waves and stuff like that. So having you know, using this, this technology, that we have to essentially just assist the captain of saying okay relax, you know we got you yeah, it's more comfortable for the passengers, it's easier on the captains and it saves energy.
Halvor Vislie:And then, moving from that, you can start building, because this is real value for the customers, right, yeah, and you need to have a plan for it, right? You need to be autonomy ready, or autonomy enabled or autonomy.
Halvor Vislie:So you need to have thought about it, which is actually, if you look at our ferry, that's one of the reasons why it looks the way it does. It's because we're able to place sensors in like all the corners yeah eliminating blind spots. Computational situational awareness of our ferry is really really good from an autonomy perspective. We've thought about it and our customer needs to understand that. Okay, you can safely buy this, even if you're looking at an autonomous future. But likely they're not going to pay for it today.
Arild Tjomsland:Still, I'm interested in where you're going. What's next, what's on your horizon? I suppose making this a profitable business is the next step. But what's your dream scenarios going forward? Business is like the next step, but what's?
Halvor Vislie:your dream scenarios going forward. So my personal vision is a future where, no matter where you go in the world, there's a hike ferry. That's probably unrealistic right.
Arild Tjomsland:Depends on the shortcuts out there. Are there enough shortcuts where you're going? No, exactly.
Halvor Vislie:And there are the worldwide market for ferries is huge.
Arild Tjomsland:Could you imagine like an AI system that uses satellite imagery to see where there's potential shortcuts on the water?
Halvor Vislie:I'm sure we could and I'd love to have like a hundred billion dollar budget to do that, but it is actually a little bit what we do. Yeah, we look at maps. We could, and I'd love to have like a hundred billion dollar budget to do that, but uh, but, uh, but it is actually a little bit what we do. Yeah, uh, we look at maps, right?
Arild Tjomsland:looking for the good spots.
Halvor Vislie:Good spots, and we have some tools to to sort of try and estimate how many passengers we would are we talking about on a particular stretch, and things like that and things like that Halvor.
Arild Tjomsland:we always ask if you have an autonomy confession to make or you have some sort of a fun fact or interesting thing from your career or something to share with us. Do you have anything, Anything that?
Halvor Vislie:comes to mind Autonomy confession.
Eja Tuominen:I think I just made it.
Halvor Vislie:Well, you know, we just need to be conscious of what the market is willing to do. It's a long way to go right. Autonomy you know planes have been able to land themselves for 20 years. We still want not one captain, two. You know sitting in front.
Arild Tjomsland:So there's, we have some ways to go, both in terms of technology and in terms of just passenger acceptance, yeah, and regulatory issues and so on but your point about the ferry not, or also fighter jets not being able to they're constructed in to work in conjunction with a computer, no matter what.
Halvor Vislie:Yeah, that's like, uh, that's autonomy going forward it is because it is the first steps, right? Yeah, it is. Uh, it is, you know, adding computational power to a lot of the processes that you would otherwise have as a completely manual process yeah and we don't have to do that anymore. Uh, and this, this in our case, you know it's, it's very visible what the result is. Um, uh, because, because we are just using wayless. You know, autonomy is really, really cool, but it is a cost-saving thing.
Arild Tjomsland:First and foremost, that's what it is Way to save money, yeah, yeah.
Halvor Vislie:Which sounds really unsexy.
Arild Tjomsland:but Well, that depends who you ask. I mean, I think a lot of your customers, potential customers, would definitely say that saving money is sexy. We don't have much public funding anymore for anything, so saving money sounds pretty sexy. Let's hope, let's hope it. Yeah, you've been listening to the Autonomous Journals, where we've been talking to Halvor Visli, ceo of Hike. We've been hearing about their ambitions and about the benefits of using the waterways in our cities as a means of travel, transport and I hope all of you use your day in a good way and, as Halvor says, I ka haik To our listeners. Thanks so much for tuning in. Join us again for the next episode of the Autonomy Journals brought to you by SAMS, the Norwegian Innovation Cluster for Autonomous Mobility and Transport Systems. Autonomy In Norway we do it.
Eja Tuominen:We are looking forward to sharing the next episode with you. If you like the sound of this, please subscribe to the podcast and follow the Autonomy Journals on Spotify and other channels. We'd love to hear from you. Tell us what you'd love to hear more about around autonomy, because in Norway we do it.