Merge Now
16 episodes - English - Latest episode: almost 5 years ago - ★★★★ - 12 ratingsMerge Now is a weekly series of conversations about the most important topics in mobility technology, with the people shaping the future of transportation. Hosted by Ed Niedermeyer, Senior Editor for Mobility Technology at The Drive and co-host of The Autonocast, Merge Now takes you beyond the headlines and deep into the important and thorny issues that arise from the transformation of the mobility sector.
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Episodes
Bonus Episode: Mark Truman Appeals To Investors To Rescue The Arc Vector
October 04, 2019 04:33 - 25 minutes - 17.5 MBI first discovered the Arc Vector in a series of intriguing patent filings that led first to a story about the high-end electric motorcycle's mind-blowing tech, and then to an episode of MergeNow with the founder Mark Truman. Today Mark is back on the show under difficult circumstances: a major investor has failed to deliver on their commitments, and Arc is in administration (bankruptcy). With one week to get financing together, Mark explains the situation and appeals to investors to help br...
#14: Tarani Duncan of Shared on "Scooter 2.0"
October 03, 2019 22:10 - 56 minutes - 39.2 MBThee "Year Of The Scooter" brought cheap little Xiaomi and Ninebot standup scooters to cities around the world, opening the public's eyes to the joys of micromobility in places where the concept of lightweight, shared electric vehicles had never been considered. In the nine months since, however, the first wave of shared scooters has proven to have real issues with durability, operational efficiency, the perception that they are "littering" cities and massive cash burn. Tarani Duncan of Sha...
Episode #13: Jon Mullen of Righthook, Introduces his Open Scenario Language
September 25, 2019 16:09 - 41 minutes - 29.1 MBAs autonomous drive development marches forward and collaboration accelerates, a new need is emerging: a language that can standardize descriptions of driving scenarios. Not only is such a language important for inter- and intra-team collaboration, but it will someday make it possible for regulators to develop a "driver's test" for self-driving cars. Jon Mullen, CTO of the simulation company Righthook, recently created an open scenario language for precisely these reasons and joins MergeNow...
Episode #12: Hong Quan of Karmic Bikes on the eBike Business and Micromobility's Future
September 18, 2019 14:55 - 42 minutes - 29.8 MBThanks to the explosive growth of scooter companies during 2018's "Year of the Scooter," a lot of the American public's understanding of Micromobility seems to begin and end with tiny-wheeled, semi-disposable Limes and Birds.Outside the US, however, eBikes are booming and companies like Karmic Bikes see an opportunity to blur the lines between eScooters and eBikes. This week, founder Hong Quan joins MergeNow to talk about Karmic's just-revealed Oslo eBike/eScooter hybrid and the evolution of...
Episode #11: Jason Stinson of Renovo on Selling the Picks and Shovels of the Autonomous Gold Rush
August 21, 2019 20:23 - 26 minutes - 18.7 MBWould you be surprised to learn that a number of autonomous vehicle development programs offload data from their test vehicles by physically pulling out a hard drive and shipping it by snail mail to a cloud services provider? When Jason Stinson, the co-founder of the AV ecosystem company Renovo, told me this was common enough for his company to offer a more advanced data offloading system from their in-house tool kit as a product, I was certainly blown away. As the venture capital community'...
Episode #10: Alysin Malek of May Mobility on the Autonomous Urban Shuttle Business
July 31, 2019 17:45 - 30 minutes - 21.2 MBAs The Drive's recent reporting on the struggles of the French autonomous low-speed shuttle company Navya demonstrate, building a business around autonomous drive technology in the short term is tough. Growing without overextending, deploying while continuing to develop and weighing cost pressure against sufficient capabilities for real safety are all difficult balances to strike. One company that seems to have managed them well is May Mobility, whose COO and co-founder Alysin Malek joins Me...
Episode #9: Mike Granoff of Maniv Mobility
July 17, 2019 19:14 - 29 minutes - 20.7 MBI was covering the traditional auto industry when I first met Mike Granoff of Maniv Mobility, and looking back I realize that he was the person who introduced me to the way of thinking about cars and mobility that has grown into my obsession with "mobility technology." At the time Mike was working on one of the most far-sighted (though ultimately ill-fated) companies in the space, Project Better Place, which showed me how dramatically cars could be reimagined. Today his unique vision has ma...
Episode #8: Bryan Salesky of Argo AI On The Evolution Of Autonomy
June 26, 2019 18:11 - 53 minutes - 36.9 MBIn 2007, Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Racing team won the DARPA urban challenge and kicked off the push for autonomous vehicles that now has real cars driving on real roads and will soon birth real businesses. Bryan Salesky was a key contributor to Tartan's victory, and he has taken the expertise he gained there to Google, Caterpillar and now Argo AI, the AV development company he founded and runs. On this week's Merge Now, Salesky joins the show to reflect on how things have changed in the wor...
Episode #7: Building The Motorcycle Of The Future, with ARC Vehicles CEO Mark Truman
June 20, 2019 13:59 - 54 minutes - 37.9 MBThe most exciting new mobility technologies are most typically being used to make vehicles safer and more efficient, but why aren't more being used to take the enjoyment of enthusiast driving to new levels? At the new electric motorcycle startup ARC Vehicles, that's exactly what's happening. On this week's Merge Now, ARC CEO and former Jaguar Land Rover "special operations" engineer Mark Truman joins the show to explain all the wild technology going into ARC's futuristic Vector motorcycle, ...
Episode #6: Dan Albert on The Automobile's Past, Present and Future
June 12, 2019 18:08 - 1 hour - 47.5 MBWhen you stand on the brink of staggering change, the path forward can often be found by looking back. That's the premise of Dan Albert's excellent new book Are We There Yet? The American Automobile Past, Present and Driverless, which scours the history of cars in the United States for clues about the driverless future. In this week's episode of Merge Now, Dan and Ed discuss some of the most interesting episodes of automotive history and their bearing on the future, as well as the deeply per...
Episode #5: Why HD Mapping Matters, With Shaun Stewart
June 05, 2019 21:17 - 40 minutes - 28 MBElon Musk's lidar bashing has grabbed public attention and dominated conversations about autonomous drive technology, but his dismissal of high definition mapping has flown under the radar. According to Shaun Stewart, a Waymo veteran and new advisor and investor at the mapping startup Carmera, we're missing out on an important discussion. Stewart talks about the importance of mapping at Waymo, why Carmera's approach was so appealing to him, and how he's supporting their effort to build out H...
Episode #4: Trevor Reed of INRIX on Traffic and Mobility
May 29, 2019 18:03 - 30 minutes - 21.4 MBINRIX collects a huge amount of location-based data that it turns into insights into parking and traffic, powering popular apps like Waze and helping cities manage mobility challenges. In its recent Global Traffic Scorecard, INRIX looks into its massive horde of data to understand where and how much traffic affects us. INRIX transportation analyst Trevor Reed joins the show to break down the long-term trends in traffic, how urban development affects your commute, and how local differences in...
Episode #3: Oliver Bruce On The Year Of The Scooter
May 22, 2019 14:51 - 27 minutes - 19.6 MB2018 was without doubt "the year of the scooter," as brand-new startups grew at dizzying rates and micromobility replaced autonomous vehicles as the hottest trend in mobility technology. Oliver Bruce has been at the center of all the excitement, partnering with the legendary Horace Dediu to launch Micromobility Industries, the Micromobility Podcast and the Micromobility California Summit. I joined Oliver at the Summit earlier this year to discuss the wild ride that was 2018, the reasons mic...
Episode #2: Dr Missy Cummings on MIT's Autopilot Study
May 17, 2019 18:24 - 47 minutes - 32.7 MBLex Fridman's recent Autopilot study has received a lot of attention, both for its provocative claims about how the Tesla driver assistance system is used in the real world and for its questionable methodology. This week, Dr Missy Cummings of Duke University joins the show to help walk us through the findings of other automation studies as well as the importance of sound methodology and peer review in studies like this. As a professor at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering, a sought-after con...
Episode #1: Doubting Driverless Dilemmas with Sam Anthony and Julian De Freitas of Harvard
May 08, 2019 17:19 - 35 minutes - 24.8 MBOne of the most popular topics related to driverless cars is the idea of moral dilemmas, often presented in terms of the "trolley problem" where a driving agent must decide between two bad choices. Beyond the popular discourse, academics have even devoted considerable time to the issue of moral dilemmas for autonomous vehicles and a number of studies and papers have been written on the subject. But according to Sam Anthony and Julian De Freitas of Harvard Psychology, the level of interest in...
Episode #0: A Brief Introduction To Merge Now
May 08, 2019 17:16 - 14 minutes - 10.2 MBWelcome to Merge Now, The Drive's new weekly podcast series featuring conversations with the people shaping the future of mobility technology. In this preview Ed Niedermeyer, Senior Editor for Mobility Technology at The Drive and host of Merge Now, explains what the show is all about, what the name means, and who will be stopping by in the episodes to come. Editor-in-Chief of The Drive Mike Guy also stops by to introduce The Drive's other podcast efforts, including The Crash Diaries. Buckle ...