Hop, Skip, Go. Stephen Baker
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.
If you wanted to pinpoint the epicenter of movement in the United States, you might consider the otherwise unremarkable Los Angeles suburb of Torrance, California. It’s barely ten minutes south of Los Angeles International Airport, the fourth-busiest in the world. The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which together handle more than one-third of the cargo coming into the United States, are just a couple of exits away. In the part of Torrance where Kevin Czinger has set up shop, near the junction of two teeming ten-lane interstates, the 110 and 405, the wide boulevards seem endless. They’re flanked by warehouses and dominated by trucks. The skinny palm trees in the medians look lonely and forlorn.
Czinger arrived at this hub in 2014 with a bigger-than-life goal: to reinvent auto manufacturing for the next century. The reigning status quo, as Czinger sees it, features massive factories mass-producing cars and trucks. These plants are geared toward tonnage and are punishingly rigid. The vehicles rolling off their lines choke our cities and cook our planet. It’s a model, as Czinger sees it, well along the path to extinction. His alternative is designed to diverge from that death march, which is why Czinger named his company Divergent 3D. His model is fast and flexible, similar, in Darwinian terms, to the small, cagey mammals that survived cataclysmic climate change millions of years ago. Automakers large and small, in his view, need the same mammalian skills—speed and flexibility—to survive. That’s what Kevin Czinger wants to sell.
Czinger’s manufacturing setup, like so much else in the coming age of mobility, encodes the entire process in software. Like a magazine or a song, or a million other products in today’s world, the entire vehicle is pieced together virtually, on a computer. Once the engineers are happy with the design, they hit the Print button, and 3-D printers spit out panels and joints, each one optimized for weight, strength, durability, fuel efficiency—in short, whatever quality the engineers ask for. Later a small cohort of robots assembles the car, plunks in an engine (either gas or electric), and adds four wheels and a few finishing touches. If the car is not quite right, the Divergent team melts down the pieces, tweaks the design, and reprints. As Czinger sees it, this new process will allow entrepreneurs and small design studios to barrel into small-scale car manufacturing. Setting up mini–manufacturing plants, he says, will cost a tenth of the mass-manufacturing norm, perhaps only $50 million, and will give birth to all sorts of boutique automakers. “We could have ten new car manufacturers in LA alone,” he says. “[The outdoor retailer] Patagonia could make their own brand of cars.”
It looks, though, like the first market for these 3-D printed cars will be in China. Czinger’s leading investors, including the Hong Kong real estate magnate Li Ka-shing, are members of a Chinese syndicate. They’ve earmarked more than $100 million for his operation, and are setting up the first 3-D car manufacturing plant in Shanghai.
ON A SUNNY spring day in Torrance, Kevin Czinger strolls through his spacious office, past a few rows of programmers and engineers hunched over computers. He opens the big metal door onto a dusty construction site. A crew is busy leveling the ground for a team of car-building robots. The surface must be perfectly flat so that the robots can piece together the cars with millimetric precision.
Czinger, in his late fifties, has the erect bearing of a soldier. He wears a tight short-sleeved shirt. The arms coming out of the sleeves seem a couple of sizes bigger than the rest of his body, and both are popping with veins. He was a college football player, and in the terms of that sport, he looks like a defensive back with the arms of a lineman.
He grew up the youngest of five in a working-class family in Cleveland. Two of his brothers were mechanics and into drag racing. Czinger, while still in high school, refitted a ’68 Plymouth Barracuda with a powerful 440 wedge V8 engine. That was hot-rodding. In those days, he says, it was the closest thing to computer hacking. “You had stuff from the manufacturers that didn’t work so well, and you were trying to make something better.”
It turned out to be football, not hot-rodding, that carried Kevin Czinger from Cleveland to Yale—and kick-started his career. Czinger was a demon