Merge Now

I first discovered the Arc Vector in a series of intriguing patent filings that led first to a story about the high-end electric motorcycle's mind-blowing tech, and then to an episode of MergeNow with the founder Mark Truman. Today Mark is back on the show under difficult circumstances: a major investor has failed to deliver on their commitments, and Arc is in administration (bankruptcy). With one week to get financing together, Mark explains the situation and appeals to investors to help bring his stunning vision of the future of motorcycling into reality.  

Thee "Year Of The Scooter" brought cheap little Xiaomi and Ninebot standup scooters to cities around the world, opening the public's eyes to the joys of micromobility in places where the concept of lightweight, shared electric vehicles had never been considered. In the nine months since, however, the first wave of shared scooters has proven to have real issues with durability, operational efficiency, the perception that they are "littering" cities and massive cash burn. Tarani Duncan of Shared has a deep background in the space, which she's leveraging into a company that seeks to offer a more sustainable and usable alternative to the ubiquitous stand-up scooters. Ed caught up with her at Shared's Portland HQ, to discuss what went wrong with "Scooter 1.0" and how to build a better micromobility business for the movement's next wave.

As autonomous drive development marches forward and collaboration accelerates, a new need is emerging: a language that can standardize descriptions of driving scenarios. Not only is such a language important for inter- and intra-team collaboration, but it will someday make it possible for regulators to develop a "driver's test" for self-driving cars. Jon Mullen, CTO of the simulation company Righthook, recently created an open scenario language for precisely these reasons and joins MergeNow to discuss his creation and its applications.

Thanks to the explosive growth of scooter companies during 2018's "Year of the Scooter," a lot of the American public's understanding of Micromobility seems to begin and end with tiny-wheeled, semi-disposable Limes and Birds.Outside the US, however, eBikes are booming and companies like Karmic Bikes see an opportunity to blur the lines between eScooters and eBikes. This week, founder Hong Quan joins MergeNow to talk about Karmic's just-revealed Oslo eBike/eScooter hybrid and the evolution of Micromobility more broadly.  

Would you be surprised to learn that a number of autonomous vehicle development programs offload data from their test vehicles by physically pulling out a hard drive and shipping it by snail mail to a cloud services provider? When Jason Stinson, the co-founder of the AV ecosystem company Renovo, told me this was common enough for his company to offer a more advanced data offloading system from their in-house tool kit as a product, I was certainly blown away. As the venture capital community's appetite for massive investments in AV developers wanes, companies that were floating on easily-raised cash are going to have to turn their science experiments into something more closely resembling actual business operations and companies like Renovo are helping them professionalize. On this week's Merge Now, Stinson shares Renovo's unique perspective as partner to countless companies in the autonomous drive space to shed light on this fascinating transition. 

As The Drive's recent reporting on the struggles of the French autonomous low-speed shuttle company Navya demonstrate, building a business around autonomous drive technology in the short term is tough. Growing without overextending, deploying while continuing to develop and weighing cost pressure against sufficient capabilities for real safety are all difficult balances to strike. One company that seems to have managed them well is May Mobility, whose COO and co-founder Alysin Malek joins Merge Now this week to describe their approach to domains, technology and business development.  

I was covering the traditional auto industry when I first met Mike Granoff of Maniv Mobility, and looking back I realize that he was the person who introduced me to the way of thinking about cars and mobility that has grown into my obsession with "mobility technology." At the time Mike was working on one of the most far-sighted (though ultimately ill-fated) companies in the space, Project Better Place, which showed me how dramatically cars could be reimagined. Today his unique vision has made him one of the top investors in what we now call mobility tech. On this week's Merge Now, Mike reflects on his early efforts to rethink mobility and how they evolved into a venture capital powerhouse that just closed a $100 million fund dedicated to supporting the future of transportation.      

In 2007, Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Racing team won the DARPA urban challenge and kicked off the push for autonomous vehicles that now has real cars driving on real roads and will soon birth real businesses. Bryan Salesky was a key contributor to Tartan's victory, and he has taken the expertise he gained there to Google, Caterpillar and now Argo AI, the AV development company he founded and runs. On this week's Merge Now, Salesky joins the show to reflect on how things have changed in the world of autonomous drive technology as it transitions from science experiment to real-world products and services. In the process he touches on some of the hottest topics in the AV world, and provides an accessible yet insightful view into one of the most interesting fields of mobility technology.

The most exciting new mobility technologies are most typically being used to make vehicles safer and more efficient, but why aren't more being used to take the enjoyment of enthusiast driving to new levels? At the new electric motorcycle startup ARC Vehicles, that's exactly what's happening. On this week's Merge Now, ARC CEO and former Jaguar Land Rover "special operations" engineer Mark Truman joins the show to explain all the wild technology going into ARC's futuristic Vector motorcycle, how these technologies are being used to enhance the rider's enjoyment as well as their safety, and where the motorcycle startup wants to go next. If you're worried that the future doesn't hold much promise for enthusiasts, be sure to give this episode a listen.

When you stand on the brink of staggering change, the path forward can often be found by looking back. That's the premise of Dan Albert's excellent new book Are We There Yet? The American Automobile Past, Present and Driverless, which scours the history of cars in the United States for clues about the driverless future. In this week's episode of Merge Now, Dan and Ed discuss some of the most interesting episodes of automotive history and their bearing on the future, as well as the deeply personal nature of our relationships with cars and driving.