This newsletter aims to separate the signal from the noise for investment in all things sustainable transportation: Electrification, mode shift, active and public transit, and mobility aggregation, across both people and goods movement.
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Byterat (Vol 48) raised a $4M seed round from Giant Ventures, Urban Innovation Fund, Collaborative Fund, Climate Capital, and others
Active Surfaces (Vol 48) won a $50K grant from the Lee Kuan Yew Global Business Plan Competition
As a reminder, the startup data set is open, for free to subscribers. If you’re a subscriber interested in accessing the Airtable with how these startups raised over $1 billion in follow-on funding, please let me know.
🇮🇹 Milan may ban cars from the city center. That would be a step more aggressive than Stockholm, which is only planning to ban gas- and diesel-powered vehicles.
🇫🇷 Following the scooter ban in Paris, dockless shared bike ridership skyrocketed. Expect data over time about how much private scooter ownership spiked as well.
🍎 In New York City, all municipal fleet vehicles will need to be zero-emissions by 2038. That’s a lot more zero-emissions garbage trucks and fire trucks to come.
🤠 Austin has become the largest city in the US to abolish parking minimums. More on parking minimums in the Vol 43 Deep Dive.
🌴 Los Angeles is demanding the power to regulate robotaxis. Both San Francisco and LA are gearing up for a tussle with the California Public Utilities Commission around state vs local control.
🔬Markets & Research
💧The increasingly frequent discovery of “white hydrogen” may change our views on the fuel. We’re beginning to challenge our narrative that elementary hydrogen isn’t found naturally in abundance.
🚢 Are ships going to be able to decarbonize? See Volume 29’s Deep Dive for more.
⛏️ Goldman Sachs has analyzed the geopolitical challenges of battery and mineral supply chains are geopolitical. See Volume 41’s Deep Dive for more.
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☑️ The United Auto Workers (UAW) reached tentative agreements with each of the Detroit 3 after seven weeks of strikes. See Volume 63 for the context; the UAW pulled off a historic win, including the inclusion of JV battery plants in their scope.
😬 GM scrapped its near-term EV production target, Ford is slowing the pace of EV investments and Toyota is feeling vindicated for its slower EV approach. It’s still early days for EVs in many markets and speedbumps are to be expected; EVs were about 8% of new car sales in the US in Q3 and about 20% in Europe.
😬😬After getting the smackdown from regulators at the California DMV, GM put its entire Cruise business on pause. Cruise has been the presumptive #2 in the space behind Google’s Waymo; this is their crucible moment.
📶 The new Chevrolet Equinox EV launched with wireless charging capabilities. Not long before this becomes standard.
👏🏽 Mitsubishi and Honda are teaming up to repurpose old batteries. This is another data point to suggest that car companies will be reluctant to share battery data with 3rd parties (See Volume 28 for more context).
🤧 Tesla may soon charge congestion fees at busy Supercharger stations. Traditional charge point operators would kill to have this sort of problem.
🤝 BP Pulse Fleet (formerly Amply) has purchased $100M of Tesla chargers. In short, Tesla is starting to franchise its charging network.
🚴♀️19 companies have united to push for a vehicle-to-vehicle standard that would prevent accidents by allowing bikes and cars to communicate with each other. The consortium is looking very light on car companies for the moment.
📦 Amazon will start forcing its suppliers to share their carbon footprints next year. For more on the inevitability of carbon disclosure even for small businesses, see Vol 65.
🌆 UPS is rolling out a hyper-local delivery service. Key to making this work is having warehouses close to end consumers.
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🐣 Startups & Early Stage
🔋 Redwood Materials will now give car dealers and vehicle dismantlers an instant offer for any used EV battery pack. Whether this approach can scale cost-effectively is an open question.
💧Universal Hydrogen demonstrated its modular hydrogen refueling system in Toulouse, France. Note the second product focused on supporting ground service equipment.
DEEP DIVE: All A-Boat Sustainable Cruising
My 2023 Bingo card did not have squares for “Go on my first cruise ship” or “Hang out with Mickey Mouse." But that’s what makes life so unpredictably wonderful: I spent 3 nights last month aboard my first cruise, Disney style. So I decided to craft this issue’s deep dive on the path to sustainability for the cruise ship industry.
The Disney Magic docked at the Port of San Diego
(While I’m unlikely to seek out another cruise experience in the foreseeable future, the experience was genuinely enjoyable and Disney ran a top-notch operation.)
So what does the path look like for cruise ships to become more sustainable? In short: difficult. My gut is that public and regulatory action over cruising’s environmental impact will cause the industry’s decline long before cruising’s 2050 sustainability goals are reached.
The maritime sector is notoriously difficult to decarbonize (see the maritime deep dive in Vol 29), but cruise ships are more challenging than, say, cargo ships for two reasons: tourism and people.
A bulk carrier ship transports some of our most important necessities, bringing medicine, building supplies, and clothing from the point of production closer to the point of consumption. While we might criticize the length of certain supply chains, few would propose canceling all forms of ocean shipping on environmental grounds.
Alas, cruise ships are purely an optional leisure activity. As regulators grapple with making reductions in maritime emissions, it’s going to be easier to cut down cruising than shipping.
In addition to the tourism-versus-necessity angle, cruise ships suffer from a people-related environmental challenge. Cargo ships are often staffed by only 20-30 people; cruise ships are transporting thousands of people, with one crew member for every two to three passengers.
This creates a host of environmental challenges as noted by Friends of the Earth’s annual Cruise Ship Report Card. Even if you could get to a zero-emissions cruise ship, you’re still left with solid waste, wastewater treatment, etc.
So instead of quantifying all the environmental challenges, I thought it useful to share ways in which the public and regulators have discouraged cruises in just the last year:
Barcelona banned cruise ships from docking at its main port
Amsterdam and Monterey, California entirely ended cruise ship services
Juneau, Alaska, and Key West, Florida instituted a cap on cruise ship volumes
60 protestors temporarily prevented a cruise ship from leaving the port of Rotterdam
Mickey and Minnie run a tight ship
Cruising is still growing at a healthy clip (excluding COVID). But it’s precarious to be in an industry at the Venn diagram overlap of “hard to abate” and “not a necessity.”
While many people had outstanding Halloween costumes, friend of the newsletter Michelle Kinman takes the cake for baking a spooky Halloween ode to the end of the gasoline economy
