The age of mobility is only just beginning

The 19th century was the age of steam.

The 20th century was the age of petrol and diesel. And the 21st century will go down as the century of the electric car. Nothing shows this more clearly than the turbulence traditional carmakers ran into in 2019. It had long been looming, but this year redundancies (see some news links further down in the enclosed newsletter by Dr Mario Herger) and profit warnings put an end to the cheerfulness.

Tesla, for example, is worth more on the stock market, at 78 billion dollars, than BMW, Daimler, GM or Ford. Waymo (= autonomous driving) is valued at 250 billion dollars – without yet generating any significant revenue. And China manages to put up car factories in less than a year.

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Baden-Württemberg in economic crisis – the spark plug as a grave light For years Baden-Württemberg was the model region of the German economy. Now the crisis in the car industry is dragging the region down with it. Can the companies get back on their feet before it is too late?

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Ten years of the diesel scandal are now proving fatal. We are currently experiencing the same in agriculture, the economy and the energy transition. Just as the diesel scandal ruined the entire car industry, agriculture is facing – or is already in the middle of – this upheaval. The longer we defend the fossil system, the more severe its consequences, as the car industry has had to acknowledge clearly. Investment now goes only into non-fossil systems; a rapid greening of agriculture and of the economy as a whole, “getting out of all fossil raw materials”, is inevitable – for economic reasons alone.

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Der letzte Führerscheinneuling (The last new driver)… | Newsletter #52 | 1 January 2020

The age of mobility is only just beginning

The 19th century was the age of steam. The 20th century was the age of petrol and diesel. And the 21st century will go down as the century of the electric car. Nothing shows this more clearly than the turbulence traditional carmakers ran into in 2019. It had long been looming, but this year redundancies (see some news links further down) and profit warnings put an end to the cheerfulness, and the hangover has set in.

Tesla, for example, is worth more on the stock market, at 78 billion dollars, than BMW, Daimler, GM or Ford. Waymo is valued at 250 billion dollars – without yet generating any significant revenue. And China manages to put up car factories in less than a year. Exactly 357 days passed from groundbreaking to first deliveries at Tesla’s Gigafactory 3 (German) in Shanghai. No wonder: electric cars are far less complex, and where there’s a will, there’s a way. The new technologies give us unimagined access to mobility, the extent of which we cannot yet properly judge. But it will bring many opportunities for many people, and we should hesitate and fear less, and instead take a leaf out of the book of those who are taking the world into the future.

Looking ahead to 2020, I can already announce that my next book will deal with exactly this Future Angst: where it comes from, what it means and does to us, and how we can overcome it.

But first of all, a happy New Year to you all!

Interviews 2019 was a very busy year, for me at least, and as late as November I was invited to a few interviews for TV and the press.

• Servus TV: P.M. Wissen – When will drones become autonomous? (German) (VIDEO)
• Der Aktionär TV: Autonomous driving, artificial intelligence – great progress in Silicon Valley (German) (VIDEO)
• 2nd Shareholders’ Day in Kulmbach: How Google, Tesla, Uber & Co are changing our car-based society (German) (VIDEO)
• Oberhessische Presse: Trend researcher on the car industry: “We lost touch long ago” (German)
• Chefinfo: “Europe thinks too haptically” (German)

Podcast & series tips A small but extremely fine selection of podcasts and series kept me breathless this year.

• The most exciting was the AI Podcast by MIT researcher Lex Fridman, who over the past months has invited a series of absolute luminaries from artificial intelligence, mathematics, neuroscience, robotics and quantum physics to the microphone. It is incredible whom he invites and the depth at which he discusses topics – it is unrivalled.
• I came across another podcast only recently. Pessimists Archive by Jason Feifer looks at inventions and innovations from the past that we now take for granted as part of everyday life, and analyses how people reacted to them at the time.
• And then a YouTube Originals series, The Age of A.I. with Robert Downey Jr. as host, offers a practical insight into the future of AI for the good of humanity. Four episodes are already out, and after all the negativity they make us believe in the good in people again.

NOTICES OF CURRENT EVENTS

• Thu–Sun, 16–19 January 2020: Vienna Autoshow 2020 Link: All details about the show (German)

• Thursday, 16 January 2020, 7 pm: Wasser marsch! (Water on!) The project in Burkina Faso Talk and discussion by and with DI (FH) Salia Konaté. Where: Harry’s Wirtshaus, Hauptstraße 60, 2102 Klein-Engersdorf, Lower Austria, Austria, phone +43 2262 72199 Organised by: “VEREIN FÜR ENERGIE-AUTARKIE” (Association for Energy Self-Sufficiency) www.autarkie-verein.at (German), Dr Herbert Starmühler, chairman

• Friday, 17 January 2020, 6.30 pm: Energy and climate protection Speakers: Wolfgang Löser and Gerhard Kaindl – solar pioneers from the very beginning Where: Gemeindezentrum Neulengbach (community centre) Organised by: Gerhard Lingler

• 7–8 February 2020, ABSI 2020 meeting, 27th congress of Bavarian and Austrian solar initiatives: Energiewende Mehr-Wert für die Region (Energy transition – added value for the region) Registration required Where: Stadthalle Roding, Chamer Steig 1, D-93426 Roding Programme (German): https://www.solarinitiativen.de/…/Programmflyer_Roding.pdf