Takeaways AUTONOMY Berlin 2023

This week I attended AUTONOMY Berlin, and here are my insights and key takeaways from the event:?

• The German 29 Euro/month plan for public transportation is extremely famous and liked by the mobility?industry. However, as any good thing, it has a downside to it, and by this I learned that by introducing this plan, the private bus operator Flix Bus has seen a decrease in their revenue numbers. The conversation around this topic was about how can you balance out all stakeholders’ interest in such a way that all involved are happy with what they get – private companies, public transportation, and the end consumer. ?
• Thomas Ableman from Transport for London has mentioned briefly in his keynote speech, that they’re?also working on such a plan for London. More about their strategy here: https://shorturl.at/fhzF7. ?
• Today public transportation, is in competition with bikes due to the poor user experience the end consumer has when we think of first mile and last mile in combination with public transprotation. ?
• Elements that have to be reimagined in the experience of first and last mile, is the bundle. That is the price of adding an extra fee for a bike and a smooth purchasing process. ?
• Similarly, we need more bike-friendly trains and develop bike sharing points?at the train stations. ?
• Safe bike parking points at the train stations. ?
• A digital infrastructure change is needed in the public transportation API standardization. APIs are so different from city to city , and from the panel conversation I discovered that Deutsche Bahn is doing a great job on this development. ?
• Utrecht and Guadalajara, were two examples mentioned of seamless public transport designs. ?
• The US and Asia are frontrunners in the mobility industry and Europe needs to catch up.?
• We need a stronger capital scene in mobility industry to bring deep tech in Europe to commercial stages and maintain the welfare in Europe. ?
• In Germany the car is the most subsidized transportation vehicle to date, and in order to boost the micromobility market, a subsidy program would be a potential driving force to do so. This is also seen by the data presented from one of the panel speakers, i.e. that the car ownership in Europe is 17% higher today versus in 2021. (I didn’t verified that, but if you do, let me know in the comments and I can adjust it)?
• Cities are facing the challenge about how to design and develop the charging infrastructure. ?
• Autonomous driving is being designed and integrated in fragments into the upcoming auto vehicles, mitigating the transition?impact it could have on the population. ?

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As a member of the Mobility Team at Baloise CH , I was thrilled to hear the VP of Bridgestone Mobility Solutions use the partnership between them and Vianova running in Paris, as a successful collaboration. ?? ?

An interesting surprise for me was the corporate spinoff twogo - die smarte Mitfahrplattform fürs t?gliche Pendeln , from Schwarz Mobility Solutions GmbH solutions, mentioned by ?? Stephan Tschierschwitz in his keynote speech?– the corporate carpooling service app. Personally I believe that by incentivizing this type of travel, we could see a decrease in car ownership.

Here are the ventures that pitched on the stage:?

1. BUSUP – they manage corporate mobility programs powered by?technology.?
2. Movacar – Aggregating the city to city rental car transportation needs and offering that the end consumer at a low price. ?
3. RiDERgy – fleet electrification and charging. ?

The conference could have been (for me and this is my perspective) packaged into an intense one day conference or on the other side expand it to two full days. Just because in this format you have dedicated 2 full days anyways, but get only 1 day of conference. ?

I like that some of the mobility experts and founders, were the panel moderators, that made the panel conversation very insightful and qualitative. ?

The quality of the panelists was great for me, a great job attracting such profiles and bring them on the stage. ?

What I also found interesting, was that the crowd voted for the best startup from the 3 that pitched but the results weren’t announced – or maybe I missed them, then sorry about that. ?? ?

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Baloise is investing in the mobility ecosystem, ping me, Patrick Wirth , James Sanders or Dr. Boas Bamberger to get to know more.

#MobilityEcosystem #MobilityBaloise #Mobility #CVC ?