I found myself driving the future this morning. Not today’s future, but the future I had imagined when I was a teenager. The passion that made me want to become an engineer came flooding back and I felt lifted up by the excitement of what a group of 100 or so startups around me are trying to do.
Politics is the same as it was 3,000 years ago. Artists still struggle to express the human condition. But technology changes things and opens up new possibilities. JFDI.Asia is based in Singapore’s future factory at Block 71, Ayer Rajah Crescent and I am now old enough to admit without shame that I love being part of it, writes Hugh Mason.
The cause of this cogitation was an all-electric vehicle. Smove.sg, our neighbours upstairs, are exploring a different spin on personal transport. What’s fascinating is that their innovation is only partly technological. A lot of it’s about social adoption and our expectations of how we get around.
In smove’s future, you won’t want to own your own car, just like you don’t want to own your own Google or your own hospital. It’s a future where you aren’t burdened by having to tax, insure, repair and garage your own vehicle. Somewhere you just pick up a vehicle when you need it, and put it down when you don’t. And you only pay for what you use.
Best of all, that future is real, if you live or work near One North. You can sign up and try it today, as I did.
Here in my car
I feel safest of all
I can lock all my doors
It’s the only way to live
In cars
I couldn’t help remembering Gary Numan, the emotionally numb electronic music pioneer who created part of the soundtrack for my teens. His two best-known songs – Cars and Are Friends Electric? – seemed to hold so many ironies this morning, beyond the obvious coincidence that smove.sg offers electric vehicles. His songs are mostly about social isolation and yet, intriguingly, smove.sg brings people together. Maybe that could be significant in Singapore, a country that recent research has singled out as the most unfeeling in the world.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ldyx3KHOFXw
It’s intriguing that so many of the technical question marks around electric vehicles have now been answered. We know how to make them go reasonable distances reliably in an urban environment. The stuff that you might think would be a problem, like charging, turns out not to be such a big deal. The biggest challenges are actually conceptual in helping people to see that the vision of personal transport we have all been sold for a hundred years – an individual car that we own – isn’t the only way.
At smove.sg, friends are electric, because the service is already becoming a kind of physical social network. Instead of it being unpleasant to share a vehicle, there’s a pride in being part of a community that’s evolving a cleaner way to get around. I am grateful to the person who used the vehicle before me for leaving it tidy, so I do the same. If smove.sg offered a meetup of its members I would go along because I know I would meet other people like me. A new generation that wants things to be different and more social.
My son is six. His school is more than an hour from home by bus, which gives us plenty of time to practice his Chinese spelling test and play Angry Birds on the iPad, but it does mean I need to get up at 5am to make sure he gets to the kick-off at 7.15 each morning. So the kind offer from Tom and Asher at smove to let me take a car home each weekday night, returning it for their regular customers to start using by 7.30 in the morning, makes a huge difference. 45 minutes extra sleep each day: anyone who is a parent will know how much that can mean.
The other thing every parent will recognize is the way that having children thrusts you back to your own childhood. You can’t help reliving it through your kids and, this morning my son was excited about going to school in a silent car that makes no noise and doesn’t need petrol. He liked the talking GPS too and his enthusiasm was infectious. It reminded me what it was like to be six, forty years ago.
I had the same sense of fascination when I read a magazine about this new thing called a microprocessor. It was 1971 and some guys at Intel had shrunk one of those computer things that usually took up a whole room onto a chip the size of your fingernail. If you weren’t there, it’s hard to appreciate now how extraordinary that seemed in Britain at the time.
It wasn’t until about 1975 that we even got a pocket calculator at home. Dad waited until the price fell below £10 – to put that in context, a whole house for our family cost about £4,000.
Hard to remember too how long it took for even that simple technology to be totally accepted. A decade later I and my class of A-level students still took our school doing all the arithmetic by hand because calculators were supposed to turn our minds to jelly, or something (we were allowed to use paper log tables).
For those who weren’t around, German uber-geeks Kraftwerk captured the spirit of the times with their track I’m The Operator Of My Pocket Calculator, in 1981:
Anyway before I start wallowing in nostalgia I did want to share the sense of hope and excitement that my son and I felt this morning. It’s exactly what brought Meng Wong and I together. On the night we met, we spent six hours talking over dinner because we recognized that we shared a passion for making the future real. We both love ideas and the thrill of creative invention. But it’s innovation – putting ideas into practice somewhere they have never been done before – that inspires us.
I’m so proud of the pioneers who joined us a year ago for our first accelerator program. They are walking the walk, not just talking the talk. Actually they are walking taller too. It’s wonderful to see that lives have been changed by what we have done together. I am grateful, too, for all the mentors, friends, investors and partners who made it possible. Couldn’t have done it without you, guys.
So the day is about to begin. It’s day 50 on our second program. This time around, I’ve been busy working on JFDI.Asia, rather than in it, so I haven’t made so many video logs last year. But maybe today is a special occasion. Watch this space.