Forget cars, what does the transition to electric FREIGHT look like? How capable are HEAVY vehicles? What’s the future of charging infrastructure? What changes for shippers and logistics companies? How should they think and plan?

On this episode of FutureBites, I travel to Cambridge University to ask Professor David Cebon, a visionary in the electrification of heavy vehicles.

David is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Cambridge University. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Director of the Cambridge Vehicle Dynamics Consortium, and -- his principal focus for the past 15 years -- Director of the Centre for Sustainable Road Freight.

In short, he is THE global guru on the electrification of freight.

We discuss:

• Intelligent charging in cities, and why top-up charging in urban freight is a BIG win.
• How electric trucks are already good enough for 80% of journeys and getting better fast
• The compromises necessary for weight-limited Loads, and how electric vehicles are close to a drop-in replacement for diesel for volume limited loads.
• Why charging at truck stops is NOT the future
• The triple-win of static charging at warehouses and factories
• The biggest bottleneck in static charging: cabling up all the connections
• Why hot-swapping batteries is a plausible, but less likely part of the future
• Why dynamic charging (charging on the move) is a huge win and a BIG part of our future
• The pros and cons of competing approaches to dynamic charging

The opportunities are HUGE.

Listen to hear David’s exceptional insights not only on the future of electric freight, but on the calculations and compromises every organisation needs to make to get there. And once you see the future of electric garbage trucks, buses, and long-haul big rigs, you can’t help but think more deeply about the electrification opportunity in ALL contexts.

Enjoy the podcast!

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As always, additional commentary and takeaways and the full transcript will be on the Future Bites page soon. More on my work as a Futurist Speaker, and why I do what I do, at www.brucemccabe.com

What is driving the NEXT generation of autonomous vehicles? How are scientists upping the innovation rate? Why are AVs utterly inevitable, everywhere? How will they transform industries, cities and even economies?

To get a deep sense of where we are headed, I checked in with Paul Newman, a trailblazer in robotics and autonomous systems. Paul is BP Professor of Information Engineering at Oxford University, Founder of the Oxford Robotics Institute, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and the IEEE in honor of his outstanding contributions to robot navigation, and Founder of Oxa (formerly Oxbotica) a mobile autonomy company involved in commercial deployments around the world.

Paul is a BIG thinker about the future of AVs!

We discuss:

• How “driving many somewhere’s” leads to a future of “driving autonomously everywhere,” and how this builds assurances that AVs are robust and safe in each and every context.
• Paul’s ‘universal autonomy’ approach, building an AV ‘operating system’ spanning many platforms, and partnering with industrial users and original vehicle manufacturers in joint ventures with shared IP – greatly accelerating the innovation process.
• Oxa’s varied deployments across shuttle-buses, airports, mines, buses, delivery vans and more.
• AI supervising AI, and how a multi-level approach with a ‘higher order’ layer making over-riding decisions when a decision is not safe enough, not only massively improves safety, but also makes it possible to innovate faster.
• The big gains being made in AI teaching, and how ‘adversarial learning’ is accelerating and scaling teaching by generating tens of thousands of scenarios to train and test other AIs.
• The future of vehicle-to-vehicle data sharing, the obligation to share data, and the big questions to be tackled on how much to share.
• How AVs will re-shape industrial ecosystems, and transport networks, and cities, in all kinds of big ways (just wait until you hear his comparison with reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone!)

Mostly, we talk about OPPORTUNITY.

What I love best about Paul is he is profoundly optimistic about the potential for AVs to drive huge positive change.

We are only at the beginning of the AV revolution. Do you consider widescale AV deployments inevitable? I do. Listen to Paul and understand why.

Enjoy!

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As always, additional commentary and the full transcript will be on the Future Bites page soon. More on my work as a Futurist Speaker, and why I do what I do, at www.brucemccabe.com

Can carbon pricing incentivize a sustainable future?

Join us for a compelling conversation with Professor Cameron Hepburn, the Battcock Professor of Environmental Economics and co-Director of the Economics of Sustainability Programme at Oxford University, as we unravel the power of carbon pricing and its potential to incentivize decarbonisation across industries, economies and countries.

What lessons have early-movers learned about acceptance and building momentum? How to neutralize the politics? How to do a better job of implementing carbon pricing in practice? What are the implications of the European Union's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) on other trading blocs, and what does the future hold?

We dissect the hurdles and triumphs at the intersection of economics, energy and sustainability, and explore Professor Hepburn's surprisingly upbeat assessment of the future.

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As always, additional commentary and the full transcript will be on the Future Bites page soon. More on my work as a Futurist Speaker, and why I do what I do, at www.brucemccabe.com