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INTRODUCTION

Where have you been your whole life? Think of all the places: home, school, work, restaurants, the gym. Maybe Carnival in Rio, a cheap hotel in Paris? All those memories and routines involved moving your body from one place to another. Movement is such a constant in our lives that it’s easy to overlook. It occupies hours of each day and devours a good share of our money. It’s central to our existence, nearly on a par with eating. If we didn’t move, we’d never see each other. Now, as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the ways we move are changing dramatically.

At about this point, as we describe this book, people often interrupt and say, “Driverless cars, right?”

What’s coming is more than just one instance of robotic navigation, and much bigger. You can see it gearing up around the world. Overwhelmed by traffic and wheezing from smog, cities are confronting the limits of the century-old automobile economy and taking steps to rein it in. Many are extending greenways and building bike lanes. Some, like Madrid, are starting to ban cars altogether from city centers. Others are charging fees to drive in congested areas while presiding over a proliferation of bike- and car-shares. At the same time, a technology explosion is unleashing a new generation of networked machines and services. And yes, it’s true, the automobile, step-by-step, is turning into a robot.

The car we all know, the gas-gulping machine we drive, has had quite a century. Our urban geography has molded itself to its demands. Its networks of highways gave birth to new suburbs, while developers carved out vast downtown acreages for parking lots. Cities grew into planned preserves for countless herds of these four-wheeled creatures, Serengetis for cars and trucks. That automotive monoculture spread around the world, from Los Angeles and Caracas to Moscow and, more recently, Beijing and New Delhi. The car reshaped the surface of the planet and poisoned the air above.

While the automobile isn’t going away, it is losing its primacy. Over the next decade, many of us will find new ways to move. This next stage of human mobility, unlike the last, will not be defined by a single iconic technology. Instead we’ll be faced with a host of choices, most of them tracked and mediated by digital networks. Where it works, this arrangement will be greener, cheaper, faster, and safer than today’s smoggy and gridlocked status quo. The financial impact, for everything from households to national economies, will be profound. Once again, mobility will reshuffle our industrial landscape, juggle the timetables of our lives, and reshape our cities. It will also weigh heavily, for better or worse, on the future of our planet.

Much of the change ahead is tied to digital knowledge—a sprouting awareness of where we are, where we want to go, and what’s available to take us there. This intelligence poses a profound contrast to the status quo of the automobile age, which has been marked by abject ignorance.

To recall just how little we knew, picture the outlaws Bonnie and Clyde on their murderous bank-robbing rampage through the Great Plains in the 1930s. They were driving on public highways, yet no one knew where they were. The police had to track down eyewitnesses and then stick time-colored pins in maps as they attempted to determine where the outlaws might be and where they’d strike next. Cars, for most of the century, were as footloose as hyenas. For millions of teenagers, this ignorance of whereabouts spelled freedom. We were out driving … somewhere. Our parents trusted we weren’t robbing banks. But they knew only vaguely, if at all, where we might be.

City planners were also in the dark. Until recently, highway engineers would stretch cords equipped with counting sensors across roads. This provided primitive insights, but only on the behavior of our motorized herds. And engineers had precious few tools with which to manage the flow. Traffic, like a force of nature, simply happened. So most cities bowed to its unrelenting pressure and dedicated big chunks of their budgets to widening roads and highways, and opening up more space for parking. The resulting status quo was rife with waste—of energy, time, and money. The massive backups, the crawling lines of single drivers in five-thousand-pound hunks of metal, epitomized its inefficiencies.

The abundant waste found in the ignorant status quo spells boundless opportunity. Planners and entrepreneurs alike can now measure and count all kinds of things. As they do, they can sharpen their focus from the herd to the individual. This fuels new businesses. A commuter in Paris, for example, inches along the clogged Boulevard Périphérique at the wheel of a Renault Clio. Say there’s a service or an app that can slice a half hour off her commute, in each direction, freeing up five hours a week. What would she pay for those miles and minutes?

These are burgeoning markets of space and time. Most of them would have been beyond our reach until recently. But a host of enabling technologies are now at hand. Arrays of sensors can now provide second-by-second reads on our location. High-speed networks, including 5G, can zip that data to computing clouds. Advanced artificial intelligence can turn it into insights about where we’re going—and how best to get us there. Blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies, devised only a decade ago as the foundation for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, provide secure channels through which vehicles can share information and coordinate their actions. This sharing is fundamental for creating hyperefficient networks—even while we’re still behind the wheel.

One other fundamental technology is the battery. The new mobility machines run, for the most part, on electricity, which happens to be what computers eat. Most of the new conveyances, in essence, are networked computers fitted with wheels or wings. Even bikes are getting smart.

Mobility, as we see it, represents the third stage of the Internet. The networked age debuted in the final decade of the last century, when rich troves of information, from mail to music, went digital. In the following decade, with the explosion of smartphones, information went mobile. That was stage two. The marriage of the cell phone to a networked computer placed the universe of knowledge into our pockets and purses, and added what amounts to an electronic lobe to the human brain. We’re now accustomed, and even addicted, to carrying around networked technology. As we embark on stage three, ever more advanced blends of that technology are carrying us around.

In the coming age of mobility, practically every rolling and flying conveyance will be a networked device. For a glimpse of what this means, open a ride-sharing app, such as Uber or China’s DiDi. The dots on the screens provide a glimpse of the future, one in which each of us moves as a node on a network map.

Ride-sharing was the first big splash of a tech wave that had been hyped for two decades: the so-called Internet of Things. Refrigerators would order milk, we were told, and smart light bulbs would brighten when we walked into a room. A good number of these machine-to-machine applications are finally creeping into the marketplace. But the biggest and richest arena for the Internet of Things will be mobility. It dwarfs the rest of the field.

This doesn’t mean that the next cars we buy will be driverless, or that we’ll soon be gliding over rush hour traffic in autonomous flying pods. These technologies, as we’ll see, are in the works and will indeed be lifting off, in some places much sooner than others. For most of us, though, the coming transition will begin not with a miraculous new machine at the curb, but with a series of new questions.

Imagine you’re a twenty-nine-year-old, just out of grad school, taking your first good job. You’re in LA. The commute—the only real downside to the job—looks to be a fifty-minute rush hour crawl to and from Santa Monica, most of it on the I-10. You need a car.

The first thought is money. For an apartment renter like you, the car will be far and away your most valuable possession. You’ll need a loan to buy it. Factoring in price and maintenance, it will cost about $8,000 a year to own and maintain the car. And the dumb thing will be parked for about 95 percent of its existence. It’s a cash drain. Even parking it costs money. Car ownership isn’t all that different from caring for a needy animal and paying for regular visits to an expensive vet. In fact, if you consider expense and upkeep, and even function, the car has much in common with the high-maintenance mobility heavyweight it dethroned, the horse.

It’s at this point, with an auto dealer reaching for your wallet, that you might consider the shape of the coming decade you’ll be sharing with this hypothetical car. Will you really need it?

Try thinking about it the other way: Instead of a car, you have the $8,000 a year that owning it would cost. That’s your transportation fund. Even a decade ago, the money wouldn’t have gone far. There was no Metro train between downtown LA and Santa Monica. Bus service was a bad joke. Taxis—if you could find one in LA—were out of the question; they’d eat up $8,000 in a few months. The only choice back then was whether to buy a car or to lease one.

But the next decade will offer new choices, and more of them every year. Ride-sharing services and scooters are just the beginning. Los Angeles Metro, once an afterthought for the hordes on the highways, is expanding dramatically, thanks to billions of dollars in bonds approved by voters. Drivers, it turns out, were so desperate for relief that they funded transit by raising their own gas tax. For many, it’s a prayer that better public services will deliver a dose of relief for highway traffic and make driving tolerable once again.

The question remains: Do you spring for the car? While your options will continue to expand, complications remain. What do you do, for instance, when winter rains pelt down and the scooter ride from the Metro station is in the dark?

The answers still aren’t easy. Even as new networks and technologies take root over the coming decade, many of us will stick with the car—or be stuck with one. The mistake, though, is to expect that the next stage of mobility will be like the last, simply with smarter and cleaner machines. In this vision, we keep the driveway, the two-car garage, and the parking lots. We hold on to the entire automobile monoculture, but we replace the gas-powered machines we’ve been driving for the last century with zippy electric models that will eventually drive themselves.

It’s natural to think that way. Early in the twentieth century, many people assumed that automobiles would simply replace horses. Sure, they’d consume gas instead of oats, foul the air more than the roads, and run faster. And yes, when they broke down, it would be a mechanic, not a veterinarian, who’d coax them back to health. But the world would continue more or less the same. The name for these new machines said as much. They were “horseless carriages.”

The automobile, however, went on to mold much of the global economy, from manufacturing to oil. It also transformed urban geography. Over the last century, asphalt, a byproduct of oil refining, coated a good chunk of the planet, including the parts where most of us live. Asphalt is what cities wear.

Billions of us are still tied to cars and trucks. Some of us adore them. Others drive simply because in the world created by cars, the car remains the best way to get from here to there. That’s why automobiles have essentially run the world, and much of its economy, for the last century.

But now the entire car economy, from giants like Toyota and Ford to Daimler, has to find its place in a world of connected vehicles, most of them running on electricity. Oil companies also face existential challenges. The move away from the internal combustion engine threatens to eviscerate the market for gasoline, which currently accounts for nearly half of the oil we consume. That could lead to a collapse of oil prices. The need for lithium and a host of rare earth minerals, all of which are key battery components, could spark mad rushes to Chile and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Disruption awaits everywhere.

Consumers, meanwhile, will be facing a smorgasbord of new possibilities. A host of start-ups, such as companies like Arcimoto, in Oregon, are building new types of mobility machines. Arcimoto’s electric buggy is a three-wheeled blend of a car and cycle, with a roof. In China’s provincial capitals, the streets teem with bike-like microcars. They’re slow, with a range of only seventy miles, and they have as much protective armor as a toaster. But some of them cost only $1,000. Mobility at its most basic level is going to get extremely cheap.

This shift toward networked mobility will also stir up social questions, many of them fraught. While the automobile economy created and still sustains tens of millions of middle-class jobs, AI and robotics enrich a much smaller technology elite. The migration of mobility toward the digital economy threatens to widen the global gap between haves and have-nots. What’s more, cities are the laboratories for this revolution. If new mobility options enhance their competitiveness and lift the urban quality of life, they’re likely to attract even more talent—in turn exacerbating the city-country divide.

THIS STORY OF movement is almost as big as the earth itself. So how do we tell it?

We start with the people who are putting it together—creating the flying machines, electric cars, AI-fueled services, and new networks that will change the way we move. The people we’ll meet in each chapter represent entire ecosystems of activity. There’s Kevin Czinger, the founder of Divergent 3D. Headquartered just a few miles south of LA’s airport, Divergent is building an entirely new automobile manufacturing setup. The car is designed on a computer, its parts spit out by 3-D printers and then assembled largely by a team of robots. If you’re not happy with it, you melt the pieces, tweak the design, and try again. That’s the advantage of a software economy. It’s easy to change and to try things. It’s why innovation comes so fast. The world of mobility is facing whirlwinds of it.

We’ll also explore one of the most ambitious education efforts currently under way in artificial intelligence: the race on three continents to teach machines how to drive. We’ll see a Chinese cartographer named Wei Luo, in a Palo Alto start-up, DeepMap. She’s building a new generation of maps, which direct autonomous cars by the centimeter and alert them to fender benders and fallen branches. This is a new rendering of geography for a different and infinitely more exacting consumer: a machine. Meanwhile, in China’s southern megapolis of Guangzhou (once known as Canton), scientists at a start-up called Pony.ai are fine-tuning the cognitive processes of autonomous cars running down their streets, while trying to figure out how much of what they learn in China, or in California, will work in Rome or Cape Town.

Building systems that can navigate the physical complexity of the world by themselves, while also dealing with swarms of impetuous, irrational, jaywalking, drive-texting humans, will be one of the towering technological feats of the century. For most of the coming decade, though, the lion’s share of business in autonomy will be for applications that can make money while smart cars are still undergoing their apprenticeship. In other words, while full autonomy is the research goal, semiautonomy will be the bigger market, at least over the next few years.

Robert “RJ” Scaringe, founder of the electric car start-up Rivian, whom we’ll meet in chapter 3, imagines a semiautonomous feature for his coming electric SUVs and pickups: a guided autonomous tour of a national park—maybe Yellowstone or South Africa’s Kruger. The car will drive itself on a premapped course, as if on train tracks, and provide commentary en route. This will not be full autonomy, but it should offer enough of it for the driver to turn around and gape at a bear or a giraffe, and even to take pictures while the wheel turns itself. This apprenticeship will be valuable not only for the cars (or whatever we end up calling them). It will also introduce us to autonomy little by little, so that when machines are finally fully capable of navigating the surface of the earth, we might not find them scary. Maybe by then we’ll have figured out how to regulate them.

Not all the new movement will be happening on land. A host of companies, from start-ups to aviation titans like Airbus and Boeing, are engineering a new generation of flying machines. An engineer named Mark Moore worked for three decades at NASA to develop robotic flying craft. For much of that time, they seemed less likely than the robots destined for Mars. Yet now more than one hundred companies around the world are building these electric airships and whirlybirds, and Moore has jumped from NASA to Uber, where the plan is to operate networks of robotic flying taxis in cities, starting with Los Angeles and Dallas. Flying pods sound even more exotic than driverless cars, and yes, there are all sorts of legal and regulatory wrinkles to iron out. But once these vessels are up in the air, they face a simpler mission than that of autonomous cars, simply because the sky is a lot less busy than our tangled world below.

Other mobility ventures are driven less by cutting-edge technology than by imagination and entrepreneurship. In 2010, Nadiem Makarim, a young Indonesian, had the idea to organize so-called ojeks, or motorcycle taxis, into a ride-sharing network, Go-Jek. He launched in Jakarta with twenty of them, and now Go-Jek has more than a million of these two-wheeled chauffeurs, and the company is spreading throughout south Asia. Once Makarim had his mobility app on millions of phones, he started to use it to deliver a host of other services, from banking and massages to package delivery. His company runs on data, and it operates one of the biggest AI labs in Southeast Asia. Little wonder Google recently led a $1 billion investment round for a stake in it.

THIS THIRD STAGE of the digital age differs from its PC and smartphone predecessors in two fundamental aspects. The first has to do with geography. The first network boom was largely local: a handful of companies on the West Coast of the United States defined the Internet revolution and towered above it. The dominant smartphone platforms—those produced by Apple and Google—came from the same neighborhood. But the mobility revolution, from its very inception, has been a global phenomenon. China is on equal footing with the United States, if not ahead of it. Israel is a key technology player, as are European hot spots like Berlin. Entrepreneurs in Nigeria, Indonesia, and Mexico are creating transformative networks that can catapult them into international markets. In short, the mobility revolution is exploding everywhere.

With one caveat: it starts in cities. And that leads to the second big difference in mobility. While the Internet engendered its own virtual worlds on screens, mobility takes place in the physical realm we inhabit, much of it in our shared space. It involves roads and bike lanes, and machines that can hurtle down sidewalks and bang into us. It has to be managed. So from the get-go, there’s a clear role for government.

It stands to reason that the world’s cities would serve as laboratories for new forms of mobility. Only they can offer thousands of potential customers within a few blocks of one another. That’s why it’s a cinch to summon a ride-share or rent a bike in Munich or Tokyo, and why it’s impossible in most of Patagonia or Wyoming. Cities are also central to our story because, increasingly, humanity is turning into an urban species. Today, more than half of us live in cities. That number is expected to grow to 68 percent of the global population, topping 9.5 billion, by 2050. This means that the urban population is expanding at an average of 1 million people—or a city the size of Stockholm—every week. Facing this crush, many cities will find themselves looking to smart mobility as an antidote to urban paralysis and asphyxiation.

But still, people will have to figure out how to manage it. That’s why, in the course of telling this story, we take to the road (and the skies) to visit four cities on four continents. Each one is a petri dish for new ways of moving people and their things. Each will come up with its own formulas (while borrowing liberally from hundreds of other cities around the world). Their decisions, from taxes to investments in electric chargers, new train lines, and the rules of the road for autonomous fleets, will shape neighborhoods, define commutes, and establish competitiveness worldwide. After all, if a company has a choice between two cities, one gridlocked and smoggy, the other where movement is faster, cheaper, and greener, the decision is a no-brainer.

You might think that Los Angeles, the most iconic car city on the planet, would be the last place for a mobility revolution to occur. For starters, who can organize it? The mayor not only shares power with the city council, but he or she must also grapple with no less than eighty-seven other independent and headstrong municipalities within the vast LA County, with a population larger than forty-one individual American states. Yet as we’ll see, LA is positioning itself as a sprawling test bed for what’s coming. It has powerful assets: a sunny climate that smiles on scooters and bikes, an explosion of mobility tech start-ups, and also a leadership position in the aerospace industry. (A mastery of new materials and lightweight construction is highly relevant to the new contraptions we’ll be riding.) Perhaps most important, LA has a population that’s fed up with jammed freeways and ready for new approaches.

Later, we’ll visit Dubai, where a government flexed with power and a near-limitless budget is positioning itself as a mobility pioneer. The plan is to operate flying taxi drones by the early 2020s. By 2030, according to the government’s plans, one-quarter of the kilometers traveled in Dubai will be autonomous. And a planned vacuum train—a so-called Hyperloop—promises to shrink the two-hour drive to neighboring Abu Dhabi to a mere fourteen minutes.

Compared with LA and Dubai, Helsinki already seems like a mobility dream. It’s a walkable city with trams, subways, and buses that seem to pass by every minute or two. But it still wasn’t easy, a decade ago, for a college student named Sonja Heikkilä to cross town for soccer practice. Her frustrations grew into a vision: What if she could call up every available form of transportation on a single smartphone app—and then pay for mobility as a subscription, as with Spotify or Netflix? Her idea is taking root in Helsinki, where owning a car could one day become an anachronism, as quaint as buying a CD. (Auto executives need look no further than the beleaguered music industry to see how disruptive the transition from physical ownership to a digital service economy can be.)

Perhaps the most important stop on our global mobility tour is Shanghai. Until a few decades ago, it was a city of buses, bicycles, and swarms of pedestrians. Cars were rare. But now, like the rest of China’s industrial east, Shanghai is transformed. It’s become a thriving megapolis of twenty-five million, complete with jammed freeways and dirty air. The city’s soaring ambition is to solve these problems while leading the world in the race to new forms of mobility. Its greatest asset is a bottomless ocean of data describing the movements and moods of every person in the city. This data, combined with advanced AI in the hands of a powerful government and a single dominating Communist Party, could one day manage human movement with the precision of an industrial supply chain.

But is this the future we want, each of us being shuttled from place to place with remorseless efficiency, like the fenders, seat cushions, and spark plugs in a Toyota plant? With each advance of the mobility revolution, we’ll confront tough choices about the kind of world we’d like to live in. On one side will be the freedom of the individual. This includes the freedom to be wasteful, to travel incognito, even to get lost. Balanced against that are the interests of society, such as safety, efficiency, economic competitiveness, and a clean environment. This tension between the individual and society will run through the mobility revolution, and through this book. The contrast will come into stark relief as we explore the race to mobility in the world’s two leading economies, those of the United States and China.

In the end, the story is about us: billions of people on the move. We measure each trip we take, whether to Kuala Lumpur or the corner drugstore, in the distance we travel, the time it takes to get there, and the money it costs. Miles, minutes, dollars. Underlying each stage of mobility, from foot to horse to cars and jets, are the mathematics of these three fundamental variables: time, space, and money. The coming mobility revolution will be no different. In the conclusion, we’ll explore how the coming changes might revamp our conception of the geography of our planet, the hours in our days, and where in the world we might be able to go.