Transportation

We Wanted Flying Cars, and They Gave Us… Flying Cars! Catching up with Lilium

Josh Gilbert
Posted on by Josh Gilbert
Vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) cars have been in the public’s imagination from the cartoon The Jetsons in the 60s to movies like Blade Runner, Star Wars and even the Weasley’s Flying Ford Anglia in Harry Potter. Where imagination leads, innovators create - and now we have growing competition to commercialize electric VTOL (eVTOL) vehicles that will change the face of individual transportation. At our Cleantech Forum Europe last month in Antwerp, we had the pleasure of welcoming Patrick Nathen,... Read More »

A Trillion Dollar Prize – Who will be the winners and losers in the new mobility paradigm?

Josh Gilbert
Posted on by Josh Gilbert
Business models in the transportation sector have stayed largely consistent over the past century, but today we are seeing a paradigm shift that is challenging the established order. Incumbents, both the old guard of auto OEMs and the nouveau riche TNCs, are facing a confluence of new systemic models and technologies challenging their core offerings. One of the key drivers of these systemic changes are autonomous and self-driving technologies. The brains of a vehicle, in the form of either radar or... Read More »

Mobikes, Mo’ Problems – How are cities dealing with the bikesharing gold rush?

Josh Gilbert
Posted on by Josh Gilbert
There’s now more than 8 million bicycles in Beijing, that’s a fact! Over the last 12 months, bikesharing companies have raised over $6 billion dollars in equity financing, with an array of startups rapidly deploying this capital by rolling out services globally. Much of this capital has gone to a select few Chinese companies – Ofo and Mobike – which have quickly moved beyond China into markets in Europe, Singapore and the US. [caption id="attachment_17496" align="aligncenter" width="751"] Bike sharing investment... Read More »

Don’t get left behind! Can we make smart city mobility solutions work for all?

Josh Gilbert
Posted on by Josh Gilbert
Dense urban environments throughout the world are booming, with populations soaring as opportunities attract people to cities. Today, more than half of all humans live in urban areas. Further, this growth is set to continue over the coming years, with the number expected to hit 66% by 2050. This influx of people and goods trying to get into and around our cities is a difficult but potentially lucrative issue to resolve. Here at CTG, we’ve brought together leading startups in... Read More »

Does Ford’s vision of a new transportation value chain suggest Amazon is the future king of transportation?

Ken-Ichi Hino
Posted on by Ken-Ichi Hino
Ford has had a fast start to 2018, laying out its vision of the future of transportation at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and buying two pieces of its future business model shortly thereafter. The transportation-as-a-service (TaaS) business model Ford envisions isn’t anything new, as plenty of players both large and small have been espousing such a vision for some time. The somewhat surprising aspect is that the way Ford is talking about it indicates that defensibility in the TaaS... Read More »

Taking Oil Out of the Big Rig: Electrification of Haulage Trucks

Chris Sworder
Posted on by Chris Sworder
As we trundle towards the unveiling of Tesla’s semi-truck, provisionally set for October 26th, we thought this would be a good time to scope out what is happening in the world of electric trucks. Transportation and logistics, especially due to the high levels of venture capital investment in recent years, has become a cornerstone of CTG research. From autonomous vehicles, solving traffic, lithium commodity markets, bike sharing, and even flying cars, evaluating trends in mobility has been a major focus. The... Read More »

How autonomous vehicles drive technological innovation

Nikhila Krishnan
Posted on by Nikhila Krishnan
As the possibility of autonomous vehicles hitting the roads becomes a reality, companies are scrambling to gain market share in the autonomous driving industry. Investments into autonomous vehicles have doubled in the past year. In the second quarter of 2017, over $1.4 billion dollars have been invested into autonomous vehicle technologies. This data also includes investments into ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft that are developing autonomous vehicle technology in-house as well. Investors are pouring money into various companies developing... Read More »

Solving Traffic: The highway, the smart way, and the long way off

Chris Sworder
Posted on by Chris Sworder
The term ‘smart city’ implies that cities can be dumb. To the city-dweller, this is often acutely clear when stuck in traffic. In the UK, a recent TomTom Traffic Index report found that the average commuter in Britain will spend five days of every year stuck in traffic. That equates to 47 weeks’-worth[1] in an average lifetime of sitting behind the wheel not going anywhere fast. My own city of London comes in as the 20th most congested city in the... Read More »

What City Traders Can Tell Us About the Future of Cleantech

Josh Gilbert
Posted on by Josh Gilbert
In a recent CTG Insights article (a bi-monthly publication written for our i3 subscribers), we examined the lithium-ion battery market, which is composed of several emerging markets such as EVs and grid storage, as well as the decades-established $20B consumer electronics market. With EVs specifically, the nascent market has rapidly grown, with BNEF projecting an 18.2% CAGR from 2013 through 2040, and with the passing of the 2 million mark of EVs on our roads earlier this week, the trend shows... Read More »

An Analyst’s Guide to Bursting Bubbles – China’s Bike-Sharing Market, and the Facts Behind the Figures

Josh Gilbert
Posted on by Josh Gilbert
Using our i3 platform, we aim to cut through the noise and provide analysis on the trends that you’ve seen, and many that you haven’t. Our database is the cornerstone upon which we build much of our insight, using i3’s proprietary intelligence on over 24,000 companies to providing clear visibility on the underlying drivers and global trends that drive sustainable innovation. We want to give an example of what this i3 data is telling us regarding one of the higher... Read More »