Category: Automotive
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CES, Paradigm Shifts, Spandrels, and Collateral Damage
What this week’s Consumer Electronics Show has to do with death of cursive writing in American schools, how to break down the elements of disruption, and more. I spent the week leading tours of the automotive hall at CES with my friends at StoryTech. (My favorite exhibit was the quietly transformative What3Words.) As we explored new Electric…
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Musk, Trump, Twitter, and New Media Math
It’s a good thing for the commonwealth that Elon Musk was born in South Africa; that fact bars him from seeking the U.S. presidency. Otherwise, it’s a sure bet that he’d run as a third party candidate in 2024. He’d win, too. Musk understands the media better than all but one other person. That one…
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THIS is the kinder, gentler Uber?
This week, the California legislature passed an important bill that could result in the reclassification of Uber and Lyft drivers as employees instead of contractors. The change might entitle drivers to minimum wage, benefits, collective bargaining, and a host of other knife-to-the-neck threats to the short-term survival of the ride-hailing companies that are, in the long term,…
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When businesses ask the wrong question
The question most businesses ask most frequently is “how am I doing compared to my direct competitor?” This is the wrong question, and it leaves businesses vulnerable rather than future-proof. Let’s use car ownership as a key example of a broader phenomenon. Car sales decline The transportation news making the biggest headlines over the last few…
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Ride-Hailing’s “iPod moment”
As I write this sentence, Lyft’s stock is worth $56.02 per share, which means that the stock has lost 41% of its value since its March 29th debut on the Nasdaq. Likewise, Uber will make its Initial Public Offering in the coming weeks, and it can expect a similarly bumpy ride as its filing has shown,…
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Nonprofits are the real threat to Uber and Lyft
There is little that is technologically defensible about Uber or Lyft. Both companies combine a handful of off-the-rack features: a smart phone app, map, GPS, credit card, and a rider/driver-matching algorithm. It would not, therefore, be difficult to clone a ride-hailing competitor. For years, I’ve maintained that Uber the verb (“let’s uber there later”) will be…
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Can self-driving cars save local businesses?
In the Center’s Future of Transportation project, we’ve seen that the impending arrival of self-driving cars has implications far beyond getting people out from behind the wheel. For example, we asked our respondents if they’d be interested in special kinds of self-driving cars that featured on-the-go services like a meeting room for productivity, a living…