Hop, Skip, Go

Frohnmayer, a UC Berkeley–educated computer scientist, succeeded early in his career as a video-game designer. One of his hits in the late 1990s, Starsiege: Tribes, was an early online multiplayer game set a couple thousand years into the future. Each player’s character was equipped with a gun, and he gathered with other tribes of humans for fights that jumped from one galaxy to the next. In 2001, Frohnmayer and his partners founded a software company called GarageGames. The idea was to develop easy-to-use tools for people to create their own video games. Six years later, Frohnmayer and his team sold the company to Barry Diller’s Internet conglomerate, IAC, for a reported $80 million.

This left him with a chunk of money and some free time. So he went shopping for a car. After a successful “exit,” as it’s called in the venture business, plenty of entrepreneurs might splurge on a Tesla S or a Porsche Panamera. But Frohnmayer is in Oregon, not the Valley. He’s the son of a university president, very idealistic, and, like many in the new mobility businesses, bright green and eager to save the world.

He was in the market for a socially responsible set of wheels, something to use when it was too wet to bike. He didn’t want to spend too much for it—maybe $10,000. He was disappointed. Even the cheapest cars seemed too big and cumbersome. He considered a motorcycle. It would be easy to park and fuel efficient. But motorcycling is miserable in the rain, which pretty much defines Eugene from October to June. Also, motorcycles are dangerous. People fly off them like missiles.

“What I saw,” Frohnmayer recalls, “is this enormous space between the motorcycle and the car.” Most trips around town, he said, involve one person, sometimes two, rarely more. So there had to be a market for people like him, who wanted a cheap and extremely fuel efficient electric vehicle for driving around town in bad weather, maybe just the mile or two to a train station or bus stop. The vehicle, he thought, should be as easy to park as a motorcycle, but as safe as a car, and with enough storage to bring home a few bags of groceries. He figured he could assemble a team to design this new species.

It turned out to be harder than software. “When you build a game in software,” he says, “you can copy it for no cost. You can fix a bug. Software is almost magical.” Manufacturing in the physical world, by contrast, proved to be “fantastically more complex.” Starting in 2008, his team in Eugene created one version after another of the two-seated roadster. This development went on for eight years—the entire Obama presidency. The Arcimoto team kept subbing in different materials and designs to reduce weight; they replaced handlebars with a steering wheel, then returned to handlebars again. They wedged stronger batteries into smaller nooks.

In all, they went through seven versions, and something was always … not quite right. But the eighth version sold them. It had a range of seventy-five miles. Though hardly a speed demon, the Arcimoto could still hold its own with cars, with a top speed of eighty miles per hour.

Finally, Frohnmayer had a green machine to strut before investors. In 2017, Arcimoto listed its stock on the Nasdaq Global Market and raised $19.5 million. That was enough to go into production. It launched sales early in 2019, but with a higher price than anticipated—some $19,900. Frohnmayer vowed to the press that with greater volume and expertise, they’d eventually get the price down to the $11,900 target. This is the tough learning curve start-ups face in manufacturing. The traditional players are wizards when it comes to mass production. No other industry has come close.

Arcimoto’s manufacturing is primitive, compared with Divergent 3D’s robotics and 3-D printing. In the Eugene factory, Arcimoto’s workers shear metal parts from sheets of steel, and then use a press to bend them to the right shapes—“Essentially sheet metal origami,” says Frohnmayer. The Arcimoto SRK, more motorcycle than car, is a far simpler vehicle than the cars Divergent 3D is designed to build. But Arcimoto also spent a lot less than the $50 million for a Divergent minifactory. The company has raised a mere $30 million in funding, and it already has its full manufacturing operation up and running. “And a lot of the money is still in the bank,” Frohnmayer says.

In the fight to build the next generation of mobility manufacturing, a host of variables are in flux. The dollar investment in manufacturing is falling, as is the cost of vehicles. Meanwhile, the choice of vehicles is exploding, and each year batteries provide a greater range and lower costs. The challenge, whether the current product is an Arcimoto, a Veemo, a Twizy, or one of the 3-D printed cars coming off a new line in Shanghai, is to build an enduring business plan for times of unrelenting change.

AT THE DAWN of the Internet age, when Kevin Czinger was busy building an online grocery business, the mobility revolution would have been impossible. Yet over the following two decades, crucial technologies advanced dramatically, turning visions like 3-D printed cars from far-fetched fantasies into factory installations.

It’s astounding how many crucial pieces have fallen into place in so little time. Start with data, the feedstock of the information economy. At the turn of the century, the age of data had not yet taken shape. This is because most of us weren’t yet spending our lives interacting with screens and surrounded by sensors, or busily feeding social networks. The networks didn’t learn much about us—our buying habits, our diseases, our networks of friends. Our lives were still largely off-line. Many computers, strange as it sounds today, sat cloistered in “computer rooms.” Laptops had no Wi-Fi. And even if we had uploaded the data on floppy disks to networks, there weren’t yet powerful cloud computers to store and process it, turning our behaviors and movements into insights and fueling crucial advances in artificial intelligence.

In those early Internet years, networked sensors, the eyes and ears of the mobility world, were still in their infancy. By far the most important of these sensors, the smartphones we carry around everywhere, did not yet exist. Without smartphones, an entire wing of the mobility economy, from Uber to dockless bike and scooter companies, would disintegrate. (For those companies, our smartphones are their customers, not us. We’re simply stuff that rides along, the smartphones’ luggage.)

One of the recent breakthroughs in the data economy has been the increased mastery of human language by machines. All our online scribbling and yammering has created massive language sets for computers. In effect, we have taught them language. This enables us to talk to the machines moving us around. Speech is the dominant interface for mobility technology. This wouldn’t have been possible, except in a handful of primitive applications, before about 2015.

By looking back even a decade or two, we can sense the speed of the tech current pushing us forward. It’s fast, and it’s accelerating. The technologies powering the mobility revolution, from AI to manufacturing and network management, are sure to advance just as dramatically over the next decade or two.

The same growth curve is being experienced by 3-D printing. In the first decade of this century, the mere suggestion of harnessing armies of 3-D printers for automobile manufacturing would have sounded outlandish. Such printers in their infancy were mostly for hobbyists. Designers could draw up something on their computers—perhaps a refrigerator handle, or a new stem for a broken pair of sunglasses. But the process was slow. Similar to a child building a sand drip castle at the beach, the printer deposited material layer upon layer, and gradually an object rose into the physical world. It was called “additive” technology. Instead of a child’s stubby fingers dripping sand, a 3-D printer used a precision nozzle that spit out minutely calibrated material, usually plastic. It was miraculous, in its way, but deliberate, built to craft one object at a time. It might have been the next stage of craftsmanship, but it was hardly a rival to mass manufacturing.

Yet the manufacturers of such devices kept shooting ahead. In the last decade, 3-D printers have radically expanded their diet and equipped themselves for more serious work. These digital factories can now consume a variety of metallic powders and a broad array of composites. This increases their range. Their speed, meanwhile, has climbed up the exponential curve familiar to other digital technologies. Traditional carmakers are now using 3-D printers to create certain parts while leaving the rest of their mass-manufacturing process intact.

When it comes to speed, 3-D printing cannot compete with the astounding production of a traditional assembly plant. The question is whether the 3-D printing process will be fast enough for minifactories to make money in niche markets—or if it will be fast enough in three or four years.

DIVERGENT 3D’S FIRST car, which Czinger showcases at mobility conferences, is a sleek, purple sports car called the Blade. It has the curves of a 1950s-era Porsche, yet it weighs only 1,400 pounds. If it had a more modest motor, it could run more than one hundred miles on a gallon of gas. But the show version, built to wow motor-heads and car writers, sacrifices economy for performance. It has the power of 700 horses, and it can accelerate from zero to sixty in a blistering two seconds flat.

The Blade is only a concept car at this point. Divergent’s business, Czinger says, will not be in producing and selling cars, but instead in leasing its manufacturing system—its software—to automakers big and small around the world. Even as 3-D printing grows faster, it will never compete with the productivity of mass manufacturing. But niche markets don’t require such speed or scale. Czinger estimates that simple printed cars with commodity engines will sell for $6,000 or so—not even a third the price of Mark Frohnmayer’s Arcimoto SRK. The plans for the Shanghai factory call for the production of nearly one thousand such cars per month. The number is minuscule by mass-manufacturing standards, but it’s an entirely different business model. If this approach takes off, Divergent 3D could become a global software platform for vehicle manufacturing. That is Kevin Czinger’s goal.

2

LA: Crawling to Topanga Canyon

The story of Los Angeles, like that of most cities, is a tale of changing mobility. Until the 1880s, LA was a small river town at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, fifteen miles from the Pacific shore. The few thousand European Americans who lived there had either made a harrowing transcontinental journey across mountains and deserts in wagons drawn by animals, or they’d taken extravagant detours in ships, some of them sailing twelve thousand miles around Tierra del Fuego.

When trains from the east finally reached the town, they unleashed a wave of migration. In 1888, as two competing railroads, Union Pacific and Santa Fe, battled for the nascent Southern California market, a price war erupted. A passenger in Kansas City could travel all the way to Los Angeles for as little as twenty dollars, then ten dollars, and during one spectacular promotion, a single dollar. To these first travelers, this rolling conquest of an entire continent must have seemed magical.

With the new railways, the West was tamed. Travelers simply stepped into a railroad car at Kansas City’s new Union Depot. Two or three days later, they would find themselves far beyond the Rockies, the Sonoran Desert, and the Sierra Nevada, descending into a boomtown of palm trees and rolling surf, a city of angels.

What wasn’t to like? Los Angeles grew, and a railroad heir named Henry Huntington avidly pushed it along. Huntington arrived in Southern California in the 1890s and promptly began to buy up streetcar companies. He extended tracks throughout the region. He also acquired an electricity company, which fueled his trains. Nearly a century before the word existed, Huntington was a master practitioner of synergy.

He was also a visionary. He was in fact building transit for an immense city that did not yet exist. While he ran the electricity and the trains, the biggest money, he knew, was in real estate. The history of railroads made it clear that when tracks came through, the value of nearby land soared, turning scrub lots into premium parcels. So he bought loads of acreage, from the foothills town of Glendale and Pasadena all the way to Redondo Beach, and then connected them to his train lines. People who settled in those areas could ride his Red or Yellow cars downtown for work and shopping.

It was a comfy racket for Huntington and a handful of other investors, but it was headed for a big disruption, similar in many ways to the one we’re facing now. The first automobiles showed up early in the twentieth century, and after 1908, when the affordable Model Ts started rolling off Henry Ford’s new assembly lines, Angelenos embraced them. In 1911, to meet soaring local demand, Ford even set up a Model T factory on Seventh Street, in downtown Los Angeles. By the following year, one in every eight adults in Los Angeles had a car, more than twice the rate in such established cities as New York. Some of these new automobiles began to compete directly with Huntington’s streetcars. Jitney cabs trolled the streetcar lines, snatching away their passengers and collecting the same fee, a nickel. A century later, this same pattern is repeating in hundreds of cities, as commuters abandon buses and subways for car-sharing services.

As Angelenos took to the wheel, downtown LA grew congested. The streets effectively became narrower because of the parked cars. They were also more crowded, because drivers then—just like today—roamed in search of parking. The streetcars, which still served the majority of Angelenos, were getting tied up in traffic. As Richard Longstreth describes in his study of LA, City Center to Regional Mall, the city council addressed this problem by voting in 1920 to ban streetside parking in the urban core.

This raised vivid concerns. The Los Angeles Times warned that if people couldn’t park downtown, other competing downtowns would spring up, in lots of other neighborhoods, including Hollywood and Glendale. Those competing downtowns would sprout their own theaters and department stores, and with their cheaper real estate, they’d be able to offer parking. This would hollow out LA’s downtown.

Within a decade, the new order was firmly established. Cars prevailed, and again, it was real estate that drove the change. Developers built in areas far from public transit, because now people could drive. Those who moved into those suburbs were self-selected car people. During this decade of tumultuous expansion, LA fleshed out much of the land between the bare bones of the streetcar networks. In 1927, the director of the city’s planning department, an auto buff named Gordon Whitnall, wrote: “So prevalent is the use of the automobile here that it might almost be said that Southern Californians have added wheels to their anatomy … that our population has become fluid.”

The alarming point about this transition, from the perspective of Angelenos who don’t want history to repeat itself, is that it just seemed to happen. From the perspective of everyday folk in the area, the process was simple: There was this new way to move. People liked it. And it promptly overwhelmed a large piece of the planet; in this case, Southern California.

Peter Marx, a professor at USC and a former chief technology officer for Los Angeles, goes so far as to suggest that the automobile in Southern California is the dominant species, and that we human beings serve it. This is tongue in cheek, of course, but his logic has the ring of truth.

Automobiles do seem to lord over us. We pay them extravagantly, and we polish and clean them—even though they tend to be lazy. Most of them labor for only a fraction of their existence, and they snooze the rest of the time in expensive lots and garages that we build for them.

Human beings in Los Angeles spend thousands of dollars every month to park their own bodies, many of them in cramped studios and duplexes. The city has an urgent homeless problem, with more than fifty thousand of its people living without a roof over their heads. The automotive overlords, by contrast, often park for free. Each one, on average, luxuriates in more than three spaces, many of them safer and more substantial than the ramshackle shelters and tents that homeless humans occupy. Parking spaces in greater Los Angeles take up some two hundred square miles. That’s five times the entire footprint of Paris.

The whole environment has been molded to the needs of these four-wheeled beings. If aliens came to earth and studied our species, they might notice that we appear happier when at the beach, on fields, in the mountains, or surrounded by vegetation. But those beautiful environments are inhospitable to cars (though useful as backdrops to advertise them). So for a century, as Joni Mitchell sang, we’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

To underscore our subservience to these machines, one more point: if, through carelessness or pride, we venture onto their paved terrain, they can kill or maim us.

SO IN THIS book about the coming age of mobility, why include a chapter about this iconic car town? The three other cities discussed in this book clearly make sense: Helsinki has its mobility apps; Dubai is spending billions for every new piece of technology on the shelf. Of course it would be silly to ignore China, so sure, Shanghai.

LA, though, doesn’t seem to fit. LA County minted the global model for highway-connected sprawl. With its eighty-eight municipalities, the county is shaped by thousands of miles of highways, driveways, boulevards, parking lots, and culs-de-sac. This is yesterday’s infrastructure. What does it have to do with tomorrow?

That’s precisely the point. Los Angeles, more than traditional compact cities, like San Francisco or Paris, must reinvent itself. The city’s leaders, including Mayor Eric Garcetti, have vowed to do just that. LA pioneered motorized mobility one hundred years ago, they say, and it can do it again. “My goal—and the goal of this city—[is] to be the transportation technology capital of the world,” says Garcetti. The challenges, as we’ll see, are immense. But the transition, when it comes, will likely be far more dramatic—for better or for worse—than in most other cities.

Consider the mileage. Drivers in LA County travel a combined average of 221 million miles a day. That’s the equivalent, every day, of a round-trip to the sun plus a one-way jaunt to Mars. You could argue that Angelenos would travel far more than that, maybe twice or three times as much, if the road experience were less miserable. The average LA driver spends one hundred hours a year stuck in traffic. Some commuters suffer multiples of that.

So for electric bus manufacturers, designers of flying machines, ride-sharing app developers, tunneling companies—for mobility entrepreneurs of every stripe and color—LA represents an immense and ravenous market for miles. The coming transition is bound to transform the economy, the cityscape, and life itself in this sun-soaked expanse of California.

In many ways, LA’s next step could be a return to its past. Christopher Hawthorne studies this history. For fourteen years, he was the renowned architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, and more recently crossed the street to city hall, where he has a brand-new title: chief design officer. His job is to think about the emerging layout of the city: where people will live, work, study, and play, and—naturally—how they’ll move from one place to another. This has led him to conclude that in the twentieth century, there were two very different LAs, and now, in this new century, we’re seeing a third.

The first LA, Hawthorne says, started out as a traditional urban center, with a strong civic culture rooted in its downtown. That was the destination of Huntington’s streetcar lines. It was where people worked and shopped and went to the theater. You can still see vestiges of this first LA, from the grandiose Union Station, built in Spanish villa style in 1939, to the thirty-two-floor art deco tower that crowns city hall.

The second LA, as Hawthorne sees it, took shape following the Second World War. Much as the Los Angeles Times’ editorial writers had feared twenty-five years earlier, LA had extended into a policentric urban region with dozens of smaller downtowns, all of them connected by a fast-growing network of freeways. It was a vast sprawl.

For a time, it was a wildly successful one. Hollywood led the globe in entertainment. Fueled by Cold War spending, LA grew into a manufacturing giant and a world leader in aerospace. And LA’s freeway culture was central to its brand, one of freedom, sunshine, and sex. “She makes me come alive,” the Beach Boys sang, “and makes me want to drive.”

Yet as Hawthorne sees it, the civic spirit, the sense of belonging to something in common, slackened during this period. This wasn’t unique to LA, of course. But in Los Angeles, as is often the case, the change came earlier and was more extreme. People spent more time cocooned in their homes and their cars, and less of it within chatting distance of fellow Angelenos. With growing crime in the area, the most gruesome cases looped endlessly on TV, the streets themselves started to feel dangerous. In the second LA, the car was a safe space, a shield.

Now Hawthorne sees a third LA rising. In many ways, it recalls the original version, the one centered on a downtown, where people bumped into one another on electric trains and crowded sidewalks. In this process, LA doesn’t revert to a single downtown. But it does become a denser place, with more people packed into many of its empty spaces, more of them living in apartments. This more concentrated population will depend far less on cars, and fewer of its inhabitants will need to own one.

This shift is already under way. You can see it in the Arts District, a fifteen-minute walk from city hall. A neighborhood of old warehouses and small manufacturing plants, it’s now sprouting galleries, cafés, converted lofts, and new apartment buildings. People bike and scooter and stroll on sidewalks. This preview of the third LA looks and acts more like a traditional city.

For this filling-in trend to spread across greater LA, Angelenos will need a host of new mobility options. These extend from the familiar—walkable sidewalks, bike paths, new Metro lines—to technology’s cutting edge: think autonomous air taxis and high-speed pods blazing through tunnels.

MAYOR ERIC GARCETTI, leaning back on a couch in his spacious city hall office, is reminiscing about his first car, a 1975 gas-guzzling Ford Torino station wagon. He reaches for his phone and does a fast image search. “Here it is,” he says, pointing to a boxy behemoth with fake wood paneling on the sides. “It was more a question of gallons per mile than miles per gallon.”

It was a couple of months after Garcetti’s sixteenth birthday, in 1987, that his father, Gil (who would later serve as LA’s district attorney), bought back the Torino from the man he’d sold it to and presented it to his son. Even with its miserable gas mileage, the Torino represented freedom, and driving in LA still seemed fun. Today, the mayor says, LA still has some “amazing drives,” up the Pacific Coast Highway, for instance, or the twists and turns of Mulholland Drive. Topanga Canyon is still gorgeous. Add it all up, and the nice drives occupy “about two percent of the time,” Garcetti says grimly. “The other ninety-eight percent you’re in traffic.” And crawling.

Driving in LA is mostly an exercise in tapping the brakes. Eastbound rush hour traffic trudges on the 10, from Santa Monica to downtown, at about nine miles per hour, no faster than a six year old on a bike. In fact, many routes in LA are slower today than they were in the 1920s, when people were still driving Model Ts.