The Week in Mobility News - 14 August

E-Commerce, Bricks and Mortar

Covid-19 has accelerated retail’s shift online by approximately 10 years, placing unabating pressure on logistics companies. FedEx has recruited robotic arms Sue, Randall, Colin and Bobby - to help respond to the surge in demand, whilst UPS reported a 65% increase in parcel delivery in Q2 this year. On demand delivery company, Doordash even launched an online convenience store to accommodate the appetite for online grocery delivery and Uber revealed UberEats’ earnings have surpassed that of its ride hailing arm. 

Whilst e-commerce transactions exist in the online ether, the goods themselves take up very real physical space. In North America, Amazon’s warehouses currently occupy more space than all of Kruger’s 2,800 supermarkets and expects to double this footprint to 400 Million square feet by 2025. 

With growing expectations for next day and even same day delivery, retailers and logistics companies are all looking to reduce their last mile by placing warehouses closer to end customers. The question is, where will this space come from? 

Amazon has already been in conversations with mall operator Simon Property Group Inc. about setting up fulfilment centres in spaces currently or formerly occupied by J.C. Penney and Sears, two once-mighty department stores that have filed for bankruptcy protection. New York City is currently building 2 million square feet of warehouses to cope with the 1.5 million packages delivered daily. 

Warehouses are noisy, busy and don’t win any architectural prizes for their aesthetics. We possibly haven’t minded as, until now we haven’t had to live next door to them. However localising distribution is vital as cities today simply weren’t built for high volume deliveries. The World Economic Forum predicts that, without any intervention, congestion from deliveries will add 11 minutes to daily commutes by 2030. Curb-side management wasn’t designed to accommodate temporarily parked trucks and even our letterboxes are not parcel shaped. 

Perhaps it’s time to give the traditional warehouse a makeover - a lion in sheep’s clothing. Or alternatively it will be companies like Cargo-Sous-Terrain to the rescue by sending goods in underground tunnels; keeping warehouses out of site and out of mind for another few years.

The Political Power of Tech

On Tuesday Joe Biden announced Kamala Harris as his running mate, a move that was welcomed by big tech in Silicon Valley. The decision seems particularly prescient at a time when tech, such as TikTok, Twitter and Facebook, have all been used as pawns in political chess by governments and the organisations themselves.

Banning TikTok in the US, whilst no doubt will devastate many a Gen-Z, represents something far more worrying. A TikTok US ban could be followed by WeChat which facilitates connections that are ultimately the foundation of the US-China relationship. With 20 million users in the US, it allows both countries to keep an open dialogue and grow commerce and collaborations. Even more worrying still, Belarus shutdown the internet in the country following a controversial election. The outage, which has been ongoing since Sunday, has impacted the entire 9.5 million population. 

Technology will always be weaponised or else used as ammunition once an opportunity to do so is identified. As inventors and designers of technology solutions, we can strengthen the pursuit of positive impact by occasionally donning a pessimistic hat to explore as many unintended consequences as possible.

Elsewhere in the transportation world

• Uber may close its app in California
• Hyundai and Aptiv name AV venture Motional and celebrate over 100,000 rides
• Hyundai is launching Ioniq as a fully electric subsidiary 
• Tesla to split stock at end of August as it has become too expensive - the announcement paradoxically increased the price further
• Connected Kerb will instal 130 pavement charging points at a new housing development near Swindon
• $27 million available for zero-emission trucks in California
• Canoo is in talks about a SPAC deal
• GM and EVGo set to triple fast charging network with an additional 2,700 charging stations
• Nikola stock surges after 2,500 garbage truck announcement

In other news: 

Writing down any prediction casts a shadow into the future which is why so many predictions seemingly become self-fulfilling prophecies once they are committed to paper (or film). 

In 1964, Rand Corporation made 84 predictions for the future. Many of the predictions have manifested with astonishing accuracy including electronic prosthetics, remote newspapers (ie online news) and automatic language translators (google translate). 

Interestingly, at number 16 is “Economic feasibility of commercial generation of synthetic protein for food” so perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that KFC have announced 3D printed chicken nuggets..

Have a wonderful weekend,