Welcome to Ride AI

RideAI - A special message to our Micromobility Community. 

Welcome to Ride AI, this is our new platform and newsletter from your friends at the Micromobility Newsletter where we track how artificial intelligence is changing the way we move. This is a very big idea for software written on very small circuits. We hope you will join us as we take an open mind on mobility solutions coming much faster than anyone predicted…  

Small electric vehicles and their friends, the pedestrians, are the most vulnerable road users day in and day out. At the same time, their partners on the road, cars, are getting bigger, faster and humans are increasingly distracted while driving them. 

Some may pray to get rid of cars, but the data doesn’t support a global ban. Some may pray for more stringent enforcement of dangerous driving, but the physical enforcement solutions can’t scale with the size of the problem. Some may pray that nations coming out of poverty and with booming GDPs won’t choose cars as solutions for their economic progress, but there is no data to support that either. 

Humanity doesn’t want a world of Flintstone’s mobility, it yearns for the Jetson’s.

And still, the idea of Ride AI is also so much bigger than our first order challenges with Micromobility. We hope to illustrate this with the breadth of companies and solutions with a landscape similar to The Micromobility Landscape. We believe AI has the power to transform our roads, our airways, our seas, our cities, our buildings and every other way we move. 

How to Follow Ride AI?

We will have the weekly Ride AI newsletter on Wednesday that will be on a different platform than Substack. If you want to subscribe to the Micromobility Newsletter but don’t want to subscribe to Ride AI, have no fear, starting next week you can unsubscribe while still being subscribed to The Micromobility Newsletter. We are also getting our website going, we will also publish a Ride AI Landscape of companies similar to the Micromobility Landscape. We will have a podcast hosted by Ed Neidemeyer and finally, we will be doing our first Ride AI Conference in Southern California this year, more details will be coming. If you are interested in sponsoring, please get in touch here. The Ride AI event will also be at the same venue and same week as Micromobility America with the hope of overlap in attendees between the two events.

Whether you are working on autonomy, urban planning, defense, robotics, fleet management, delivery, telematics, freight, logistics, air/sea/space exploration, we believe all your industries will be shaped by technology. We want to hear from you and share your story. 

Thank you for all the support, send us all your mobility related technology news and announcements and let’s ride together to a better future.

Now on to our first edition of Ride AI…

Vehicle Speed Limiters Proposed in new California Bill

Welcome to the Ride AI Newsletter, your weekly digest of important events and new developments at the intersection of technology and transportation. 

Here’s What You Need to Know Today

Berlin-based startup Vay is launching a teledriving service in Las Vegas. What’s teledriving, you ask? It’s a novel taxi service where cars are remotely driven to a customer location, and then “handed off” for the customer to drive where and how they wish. Once you’re done, just get out and the remote operator drives it away. It offers more privacy and flexibility than typical taxi or rideshare services, and should also be more cost effective.

The Amazon Industrial Innovation fund, a $1B USB investment in the e-commerce giant’s delivery platform, is increasingly targeting AI, autonomous vehicles, and robotics. A key area of focus for the fund is finding startups with autonomous vehicle technology for middle- and last-mile delivery.

The term “software-defined vehicle” is popping up more and more, but what the heck does it mean? This term is loosely used to describe how cars are evolving to largely software-run devices, no longer simply mechanical in nature. This excellent writeup by TechCrunch explores this term and how SDVs will impact all of our lives.

Gatik, a startup focused on autonomous middle-mile delivery, announced the integration of intelligent tire technology from Goodyear. Real-time data on cornering and braking stiffness, rolling resistance and tire load allows the autonomous delivery trucks to drive more safely and efficiently.

A report from the Insurance Information Institute found that the biggest cause of distracted driving is cellphone use. This problem will only get worse as smartphones become even more ubiquitous, and underscores the need for autonomous vehicles that can safely replace distraction-prone human drivers.

General Motors is officially shuttering their Ultra Cruise program, which was announced in 2021 and intended to offer hands-free driving in 95% of driving scenarios. As GM learned the hard way, there’s a difference between hands-free driving - which requires the driver to be paying full attention and ready to take over when needed - and autonomous driving, which is what we actually need if cars are going to drive themselves in proximity to other cars and vulnerable road users.

A new bill proposed in California would mandate speed limiting technology in new vehicles sold in the state. Vehicles with this technology would rely on GPS data and be unable to exceed posted limits by more than 10 mph (16 kph). A similar New York State bill would install limiter devices only in the vehicles of people with multiple speeding citations.

Verses AI and Analog are partnering to develop smart city infrastructure for the United Arab Emirates. Starting in Abu Dhabi, the collaboration will focus on the smart mobility, healthcare, and energy sectors, with developments expected to be showcased in in 2024.

The UK city of Hull implemented an AI-based traffic management system, currently in a trial run on several key routes. It uses data collected during morning and evening rush hours and modifies the sequencing of traffic lights to enable more efficient flow of vehicles.

Hyundai’s new ICONIQ 5 robotaxis will be built in Singapore. Hyundai is partnering with Aptiv in a joint venture called Motional, which specializes in commercializing autonomous vehicles and plans to deploy vehicles in the US starting in 2024.