Introducing Asymcar
by Horace Dediu
If Apple can have a hobby then so can Asymco.
Jim Zellmer and I were having fun talking about cars and thought why not record our conversations and put them up for others to listen. That's how Asymcar got started.
Besides having fun, what we plan to do is use the auto industry as a lens to understand how disruption works. Whereas Asymco is a narrative on an industry that is dynamic because of disruption, we hope to make Asymcar a narrative on an industry that isn't dynamic because of a lack of disruption. A sort of foil to Asymco (or maybe an Asymco Bizarro.)
The approach is to use stories that everyone can understand whether you care about cars or not. The inspiration was the TV program Top Gear which satirizes the adolescence of the male mind, and thus appeals to all. With Asymcar we hope to bring a rich set of new metaphors to describe similarly curious phenomena.
Check out the first Podcast: Tubular exoskeleton-type thing
12 comments
icon ·
Needs a new icon!
Oliver Bruce ·
Awesome Horace! Very much looking forward to this series!
majgr ·
Is there any RSS feed with podcast, only iTunes?
Matthew Gunson ·
Really like this idea.
Farshad Nayeri ·
Great idea! Was looking for the accompanying Padcast and didn't find it. :-)
Zack Katz ·
Neutral 2.0?
jim_zellmer ·
Good catch. I just added the RSS podcast feed along with iTunes. Give it a try.
professortom ·
As James May said, "We already have self-driving cars. They're called taxis!"
professortom ·
As I said in a previous comment, I don't that that the electric car is the product that will disrupt vehicles that are powered by internal combustion. I think that, short of disrupting and thus making internal combustion irrelevant all together, the tool to replace octane powered vehicles is hydrogen. Yes, I know that hydrogen is flammable, less safe than octane etc. But those sound like "simple" problems for science to solve.
The reason why I think hydrogen is the logical replacement for octane is that hydrogen is abundant and can use the existing infrastructure for distribution and collection. That is to say, hydrogen can be stored in tanks and delivered via a tanker trunk and dispensed via a pump. As such, refueling a hydrogen vehicle should take appreciably no longer than refueling an octane engine.
It seems to me that the current incumbents could embrace this technology much more easily than electric cars.
Horace Dediu ·
I agree Series 20 is weak. Producing TG seems to depend on many variables and it's not yet possible to get consistency. I suspect there are the usual corrosive forces affecting success at work.
KirkBurgess ·
Here is my take on electric vehcile disruption possibility:
Electric cars will likely be highly disruptive to the energy industry surrounding cars, while at the same time simply be a sustaining non-disruptive innovation to the car manufacturing industry.
I don't think hydrogen has a chance considering the huge amount of infrastructure investment that would be required for little benefit over gasoline. Electric vehicles on the other hand require virtually no new infrastructure - every home already has electricity, as does almost every workplace. Also worth noting that every gasoline filling station also has electricity, and the cost to install Tesla like superchargers will be much less than the cost of switching to hydrogen. EV range is increasing, and charging times are decreasing. Electricity as a vehcile energy source is far more developed for consumer use than hydrogen at this point.
And then we come down to simple cost. It might not be so obvious in some markets with cheap gas (like the USA) - but in many markets electricity is quite simply a cheaper power source than gasoline.
fl1nty ·
Horace it would be great if you could somehow share show notes on the podcast. You mentioned someone who was on the board of tata motors consulting on the nano car. The name wasn't clear - clay something. Could you type it out in a reply?