I. The promise of "New Mobility“

I still remember clearly when I tried this new DriveNow service at the beginning of the last decade: It felt like science fiction that suddenly became a reality: Just take out your smartphone, book a vehicle and drive off. At the time, it gave me a tremendous feeling of freedom and joie de vivre. With the aftertaste of "this can't actually go well for long" with the hope of "if it really works, it will be a revolution." The smartphone opened the door to a new dynamic world of mobility - which before had seen only the long relentless battle between cars and public transportation, and very little in between. But now, suddenly, a door opened...

A few years earlier, it began as the concept of sharing economy - sharing things and thereby creating new utility for the users, the service providers and the society. The idea struck a tone in the (financial) crisis years but felt consequential and logical also afterwards. And the digitization suddenly offered us tools to make it a reality (https://gruenderplattform.de/green-economy/sharing-economy)

An early driver of this trend in the mobility sector were the above-mentioned new forms of car sharing, which made it possible to rent vehicles very easily via smartphones. DriveNow and Car2Go established early on that counterintuitively these forms of mobility were also offered by car manufacturers... after all, these services called the classic business model of vehicle sales into question (https://www.autoblog.com/2008/10/21/daimlers-car2go-rent-a-smart-anywhere-anytime/)

?With these first offers, an idea grew in many people that mobility only had to be made smarter, and many fundamental problems of vehicle traffic and mobility could be solved, which had remained unsolved for decades. (as an example - a typical report from the 90s --- a lot of politics and heavy discussions about structures and developments: https://www.ioew.de/uploads/tx_ukioewdb/IOEW_SR_039_Verkehrswende.pdf)

More and more ideas came into play and investors got excited about a new mobility ecosystem, driven by platform thinking and ambitious companies like Uber and many new Unicorns (https://www.sbdautomotive.com/en/auto-tech-investing-3)

?This way of thinking reached its peak when, in the second part of the last decade, the entire automotive and mobility industry agreed on an idea that was best expressed by the Daimler principle CASE: Future mobility should become more connected, automated, shared and electrified. (https://group.mercedes-benz.com/innovation/case-2.html) Each of these innovations sounded exciting, together it seemed clear, that everything in the way we experience mobility was about to change.

?At the same time, additional pressure from the society was growing: a "business as usual" approach to cars and traffic chaos was simply no longer acceptable due to increasingly strict climate protection requirements and loss of trust in the face of crises such as the diesel scandal at Volkswagen.

?It was time for a new mobility world, and at the latest when I myself was allowed to develop digital mobility products starting in 2012, I was on fire. This was the big fundamental turnaround that would change and revolutionize entire industries, and I was there live. The optimism was endless and the projections for the future were clear.

?But towards the end of the decade, the signs shifted, which will be discussed in the next part of this series: New mobility - still a revolution, or already at its end?

?Do you still remember, how you felt one decade back? What was your take on the early optimism and was it different from the mobility discussions 20 or 30 years earlier? I am very interested in your perspective, please share your views and opinions.