— It’s been a nerve-racking few years for the traditional vehicle industry given the surge of ride-hailing start-ups and the expansion of Tesla.
Our hypothesis: We’ll see pretty negative pressure on car-sharing and it will be driven by institutional memory. Even if Covid-19 is all over and we have vaccines, I think as human beings we’re descendants of those guys who panicked. It was an important survival instinct. We just evolved to have some residual fear over a long period of time.We’re looking at different deals for companies that do antimicrobial spraying and things with UV lamps.
And then there are companies that get humans out of the loop. This is what Digital Motors does — they allow you to purchase the vehicle like you purchase a Tesla. You go online and click, click, click, and it’s done. Fixico is doing kind of the same — they’re replacing human appraisers. We’re investors in two off-road autonomous companies. SafeAI, which builds an autonomous stack for mining and construction equipment, and Verdant Robotics, which builds an autonomous stack for crops. Think about apples, oranges and peaches. It’s all manual labour — thinning, spraying, pruning. Can you take the best pieces of on-road autonomy and build robots to replace humans in dangerous or very unpleasant labour? It’s low-speed vehicles — you don’t have traffic lights.