Hop, Skip, Go. Stephen Baker

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СКАЧАТЬ designer named Mark Frohnmayer is putting together one such machine, an electric auto–motorcycle hybrid called Arcimoto. Imagine, for starts, turning a tricycle around, so that two wheels are in front, one behind. Then expand it to the size of a motorcycle, put in a couple of seats, one behind the other, and enclose it with an arc of plexiglass. These odd beasts are now rolling out of an Oregon manufacturing plant and selling for $11,000.

      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.

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