🦝 Su$tainable Mobility, Volume 26
This bi-weekly newsletter aims to separate the signal from the noise for making money in sustainable transportation: Electrification, mode shift, active and public transit, and mobility aggregation, across both people and goods movement.
This week, we have a founder Q&A featuring Manuel Saez of Beyond. This is the fifth founder Q&A, following Jesse Forrester (Mazi Mobility), Raven Hernandez (Earth Rides), Madison Rifkin (Mount), and Driss Ibenmansour (Motto, formerly known as Bloom).
STARTUP WATCH
👨🏾💻 Algorithm People (United Kingdom): Fleet optimization and decarbonization software
🛺 Alt Mobility (India): EV leasing platform for commercial vehicle users
🛳 Azure Yacht Group (Florida, USA): Hybrid-electric yachts
🛵 Barq (United Arab Emirates): 2 wheel EVs designed for the Middle East and North Africa
🤳🏽Bauen (New York, USA): Independent aggregator for EV charging stations
🔌 Coral Charge (California, USA): Grid independent, solar + battery storage integrated DC fast charging system
🤳🏽 EV Plugs (India): Independent aggregator app for EV charging stations
🔌 Itselectric (New York, USA): Curbside EV charging solution with host revenue share
🤳🏽 Narya (California, USA): Digital assistant tool for home EV charger install
🚲 Tilt (India): Shared e-bikes for campuses
☀️ Trailar (United Kingdom): Flexible aftermarket solar install for heavy-duty vehicles
🔋 TyFast (California, USA): New battery anode chemistry allowing ultrafast charging and extended battery life
QUICK HITS
Canada and California are moving forward with plans to ban the sale of internal combustion engine (ICE) passenger vehicles by 2035. While these policies help clarify direction, the roadmaps of most passenger car manufacturers don’t assume ICE sales in developed markets by then. Instead, keep an eye on what both do with heavy-duty trucks, which are still a wildcard in terms of decarbonization.
Biden gives ethanol a boost. Volume 24 called this out as a likely outcome of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This step may temporarily lower fuel prices, but at an underappreciated environmental cost.
Cities are slowly changing their policies on pulling over drivers for minor traffic violations. This touches on themes from volume 9; the change can’t come soon enough.
Los Angeles to electrify its entire municipal fleet. Other cities will follow suit.
Geofencing improves safety outcomes in Sweden. The long-term opportunities for safety and environmental outcomes are huge, as are the cybersecurity risks.
Honda and GM are partnering on EV development. Honda has spent the last decade in catch-up mode versus other automakers, after an enviable lead in the 1980s and 1990s.
Hertz has announced plans to purchase 65k zero-emissions Polestars. Historically, none of the rental car operators have been consumer-centric, so it will be interesting to see if they can help EV neophytes have a successful EV rental experience.
American Airlines is adding bus service to certain regional routes. Given pilot shortages and high fuel prices, this multi-modal approach makes great sense.
Diesel truck pollution disproportionately affects communities of color. Freight is designed to run through neighborhoods of color, with dramatic impacts on local health.
Gas stations may be slowly facing extinction. The EV charging experience is fundamentally different from gas, so many gas station property owners may find it more compelling to undertake environmental remediation and convert their properties to other uses.
Panasonic continues to try to wean itself from Tesla. Panasonic urgently needs to diversify its customer base to avoid being at the whim of Tesla’s decisions.
Google is giving employees free scooter subscriptions to entice them back into the office. And it’s still pennies on the dollar compared to the cost of employee parking.
Oakland has released the results of its universal basic mobility pilot. Much like Google’s scooter program, the costs of some of these programs can pale in comparison to the cost of further dependency on private car ownership.
FOUNDER Q&A: Manuel Saez, Beyond
Q: What does your company do?
A: Micro mobility subscription platform.
Q: What is the problem your company is solving?
A: Most people want to use micro vehicles, but buying and owning them is challenging. Their high price tag and the lack of technical understanding of e-bikes and scooters bring lots of anxiety to the purchase process. Even worse, there is no infrastructure to service the vehicles; most bike shops do not want to fix them.
We created a platform to make it easy for people to access (low friction subscription) and use (free maintenance included) micro vehicles every day.
Q: How do you quantify the sustainability impacts of your company in the mobility sector?
A: Our ultimate metric is CO2/miles traveled per vehicle. We account for total emissions during manufacturing, shipping, use & maintenance (subscription), refurbishing, and recycling. On average, our vehicles are subscribed for ~30 months before they get refurbished and sold as Second Life, providing over ~7,500 miles of use.
260kg CO2 emissions / 7,500 miles, which is 33x fewer emissions than a car (sources: US EPA, Zemo Partnership).
Q: Has shared micromobility plateaued and will further growth all be driven by owned & subscription micromobility markets?
A: The bulk of the growth will come from owned and subscriptions.
I see a parallel between the car industry and micro-mobility. The car industry started with an ownership model; it evolved to ride-hailing (Uber/Lyft). The micro-mobility space was the opposite, we started with ride-sharing (Bird, Lime), and we are now moving to ownership/subscription.
Q: UCLA recently released an interesting study showing that scooter riders experience higher injury rates than users of other form factors (bicycle, motorcycle) or pedestrians. What is it going to take for the US to be serious about protecting micromobility users?
A: In the bigger picture, to protect micro-mobility users, we need Infrastructure in which cars and micro vehicles are considered equally important. Ultimately, like many issues, it comes down to political will.
A note on the study: The study was carried out in LA, where most scooter riders use ride-sharing. I believe the behavior of people who buy/subscribe is different in the positive sense; they are primarily daily riders, so they are better at it, which is conducive to fewer accidents.
Q: Battery swap for micromobility is scaling in South Asia and Southeast Asia. What might it take to catch on in the US?
A: In Asia, e-bikes and mopeds are much more prevalent than in the US, so the demand is more significant than in the US. I think the question is not when will the US catch up, but how to get to a similar adoption rate of micro vehicles in the US?
Better infrastructure may be the obvious answer, but I believe that before that happens, we can get more people riding micro vehicles if we provide them with vehicles that are easy to access and are genuinely better alternatives to cars for short trips.
Q: What's it going to take to get micromobility assembly and manufacturing to scale in North America?
A: I think we are over the tipping point; the pandemic, the supply chain disruptions, and the current geopolitical environment make diversification of product sources a must.
Q: Many of the shared micromobility players rely on off-the-shelf hardware from Segway Ninebot and others. For the subscription model, how important is custom hardware versus off the shelf?
A: For a micro-mobility subscription service to be profitable, it needs high operational efficiency. We created a proprietary software platform to help us manage our fleet and our customers and designed our vehicles specifically for a subscription business model. We use fewer components and made them easy to assemble/disassemble, which is ideal for optimizing maintenance and recycling.
Q: What funding stage is your company at and where are you headed next?
A: We basically bootstrapped our way to where we are today; we have only raised a pre-seed round from micro VCs and Angels in NYC and we are on track to be profitable in a few months. We’ll be raising a round soon to open new markets and fuel growth.
Q: What business challenge are you most looking forward to addressing in the next year?
A: I am looking forward to addressing the needs of delivery workers.
Q: What's the best book you've read in the last year?
A: The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.
Q: Favorite guilty pleasure? (TV show, junk food, etc)?
A: I don't watch TV, but I am a rugby fan, so I watch the English Rugby Premiership every weekend.
Q: What's been the hardest thing you've had to do as a founder?
A: To let go of people I liked who were not the right fit for the company.
Q: What advice would you give other founders in the sector?
A: Start with yourself. It is harder to make things happen if you're not in good health (mental, physical).
