Defining Mobility for the Automotive Industry

Since launching Techstars Mobility in Dec of 2014, the #1 question I get asked is: What does mobility mean? And the follow-up: How does this relate to the automotive industry?

And to be honest, when we launched the program, I didn’t have a great way to answer this question. Thankfully, I had some friends that had a better sense than me. Fontinalis Partners, a VC firm co-founded by Bill Ford, along with Ford, and Magna all shared their perspectives with me. And it became clear: their definitions were different and changed frequently to address the rapidly expanding market. As with any new, emerging market, it’ll take time and experience to offer a clear and consistent definition.

Since launching the program, I’ve talked with and read over applications from more than 1000 startups in the mobility space. From the applications to our 2015 and 2016 programs, to general outreach, I’ve seen companies far and wide. And not just companies in the United States, but all over the world. Over the last 2 weeks, I’ve talked with companies from Dubai, Moscow, Kyiv, Buenos Aires, Vienna, Tokyo, Bangalore, Estonia, Cape Town, Chile, Lithuania, Kenya, Latvia, Germany, France, Sweden, Toronto, Mexico City, London, Portugal, Romania, Taiwan, and Italy to name a few :)

Mobility means so many different things from a global perspective.

How I define Mobility

After 18 months and reading nearly 1000 Techstars Mobility applications, I arrived at this succinct definition.

Technologies and services that enable people and goods to move around more freely.
– Ted Serbinski

Simple and elegant. The key things to take away are:

• Simple
• No mention of automotive
• Keywords: services and goods
• Slightly vague but still specific enough without being verbose

Why This Definition

The world is changing incredibly fast. How people get from point A to point B is changing too.

• Urbanization: More than half the world’s population lives in towns and cities. By 2040, two in three people are expected to live in urban environments.
• Sharing economy: We’re transiting from an ownership-centric society to one of a sharing economy. Sharing a ride, sharing a home, and sharing an office are becoming all the norm.
• On-demand: Postmates delivers local restaurant food and Instacart which delivers groceries within 1 hour.
• Mobile technology: The mobile boom of the last decade has given everyone a supercomputer in their pocket. Embed these into objects around them, and boom, the emergence of the internet of things, connecting trillions of things.

The Underlying Automotive Change

When you combine all those factors, a perfect storm of change emerges to disrupt existing business models, especially in the automotive and transportation sector.

Automotive is now too narrow of a term. A new term needs to be used to include all of these new technologies and services. And what better word than mobility.

What the Automotives Think

Bill Ford was years ahead of the industry. He introduced his “Blueprint for Mobility” back in early 2012. He talked about a future beyond traffic gridlock in 2011. And in 2009 he started Fontinalis Partners to invest in this emerging sector.

We become a piece of the mobility ecosystem. In this new world, we need to figure out what we have to own and what we don’t and to be a great integrator of technologies and services. We need to figure out who are friends, who are foes, and how do we turn our foes into friends.
— Bill Ford, Executive Chairman, Ford

Fast forward 4 years, and we’re seeing the automotive companies turning this vision into a reality. Looking at 2 of the Big 3, we see just that.

“As we’re thinking about the company, we’re thinking about ourselves not only as car, utility and truck company, but also as a mobility company”
— Mark Fields, CEO of Ford

“Some might find this massive change to be daunting, but we look at it and see the opportunity to be a disruptor. We believe our decades of leadership in vehicle connectivity is fundamental to our quest to redefine the future of personal mobility.”
— Mary Barra, CEO of GM

The 2016 Automotive Shifts into Mobility

So what does an automotive company in transition to a mobility company, look like?

At the Detroit 2016 auto show, we saw a huge transformation in the perception of Ford.

Take a look at Ford’s booth compared to others:

To me, it was quite clear Ford felt more like a tech company than an auto company at the auto show.

But Ford is doing even more:

• Last year, Ford jumped into the car sharing business with a pilot launch in London.
• This year, they are turning F-150s into drone launch pads
• Launching a on-demand bus sharing service with startup Bridj
• Launched a pilot to allow lease-sharing service with friends in Austin
• Spun out Ford Smart Mobility as a separate entity to “do more faster”

And GM is moving faster with bigger headline grabs:

• Launched its car sharing service Maven after acquiring Sidecar
• Invested $500M into another car sharing service Lyft
• Bought Cruise for nearly $1 billion

Expanding our Definition

And that’s why I’m so excited that Techstars Mobility has partnered with Ford and others. We’re defining mobility for a whole new range of startups. And impacting the entire industry at the same time.

Taking our definition, here are the areas of most interest to us.

We’re looking at solutions that go across connected cars, trucking and multi-modal applications. Multi-modal referring to all modes of transportation, the glue, from getting you to point A to point B.

The automotive landscape is changing drastically and I’m excited to help play a small part in helping to define this new future of mobility.

Thanks to Jessica Robinson for feedback on earlier versions of this post.