Hello and welcome back to The Station, a weekly newsletter dedicated to all the ways people and packages move (today and in the future) from Point A to Point B.
For my American readers, you might be traveling perhaps for the first time in more than a year because of the Memorial Day holiday. While Memorial Day is meant to honor members of the U.S. military who died while serving, the three-day weekend has become the unofficial kick off to summer. This year, those traveling by car, truck or SUV will be met by the most expensive Memorial Day weekend gas prices since 2014, according to AAA. The organization also estimates that 37 million Americans will travel by plane and automobile over the holiday a 60% increase over the same period last year.
Thousands of electric vehicle charging stations will be built around the country over the next decade. ChargerHelp!, founded in January 2020 by Kameale C. Terry and Evette Ellis, wants to make sure they stay up and running. The idea for the on-demand repair app for EV charging stations came to Terry when she was working […]
Electric hypercar phenom and founder Mate Rimac is heading to TC Sessions: Mobility 2021
A decade ago,
Rimac Automobili was one-person startup in a garage. Today, the EV and technology company founded by Mate Rimac employs more than 1,000 people, has partnerships with Porsche and Hyundai Motor Group and is on track to launch its 1,914 hp, all-electric C Two hypercar this year.
If that weren’t enough, Rimac also launched a subsidiary company Greyp Bikes to produce electrically assisted bicycles. It’s a notable run for a company that Mate Rimac founded after converting a 1984 BMW into an electric vehicle that at one time was the fastest in the world. What makes it remarkable is he started the company in Croatia and at time that lacked the typical network found in Silicon Valley.
Here’s a crypto-meets-transportation story for you before we move onto the rest of the news.
Just weeks after Tesla CEO Elon Musk and CFO Zach Kirkhorn said they believe in the longevity of bitcoin, the company has changed its stance. Musk, who has dubbed himself Technoking, tweeted that Tesla has suspended purchases of its electric vehicles with the cryptocurrency because of its concern about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal.
The tweet from Musk sent the price of bitcoin down. Ah, but wait, the crazy hijinks were just getting started. Musk’s tweet was clear that while bitcoin was out, other cryptocurrencies were in. “We are also looking at other cryptocurrencies that use
Dear Startups: Don’t repaint, reinvent
I feel hungover. No, not in the traditional sense, but in the dizzying way you feel when half of your world is celebrating double vaccinations and no masks, and the other half, across the world, is mourning death and not a shred of light at the end of the tunnel. The privilege of watching this unfold is like playing the worst game of musical chairs, except some seats are clouds and others are simply rows of knives.
For tech, the questions that we will be debating are bigger than if “that conference will be virtual or in-person.” Instead, we’re now trying to figure out what the future of work and education are for the second time in a year. The United States is reopening and that means a lot of the culture of how we work will be rewritten. Shifting from an individual mindset to a collective, more distributed world is going to be harder than taking a mask off and popping an aspirin.