David 0 Goliath 2 

So just a few short months after Modec went under, Think EV – the funky Norwegian electric vehicle company has filed for bankruptcy. (The 4th time in its history). The pace of change in the electric vehicle market is astonishing – all the major auto manufacturers are piling in and the early, pioneering electric vehicle companies are struggling to adjust. And it’s not just the car makers – energy companies like RWE see the market as a massive opportunity and others such as betterplace are making huge (and scary) bets on how refueling technology will evolve. A year ago I talked at length with Richard Canny, then CEO of Think about the brand’s future. At that point there were several options – many of them involving partnering with others or becoming a kind of ‘Intel’ player in the rapidly emerging EV industry. (Although even a year ago most auto commentators were highly cautious about the speed of market development). By far and away the least attractive option was to continue to plough along as a stand alone manufacturer. Let’s face it – once electric vehicles went mainstream the appetite for funky, quirky, but ultimately not very pretty little cars like G-Whizz and Think was always going to wane. Richard’s not there anymore - but his view that collaboration remains the best option for these kinds of players seems (sadly) to be supported by what happened to Think yesterday. We’ve been talking about brands collaborating for a while now. And it seems to me that for some brands in some markets (like Evs) it’s not just one of the options to consider. It’s the only option. In these fast developing markets no single brand has the resources, the reach, the expertise, the technology to be able to compete successfully on their own. And more than that it’s not in their interests to do so. Using your brand not as a tool for competition, but as a means to find and attract partners who share the same aims, seems a really smart move.
We’re going to roadtest some of this thinking next week in Sweden at the Tallberg Forum – a gathering of some of the very great and the very good who want to shape the world into a better place. If you happen to be there please come and talk.

What if David & Goliath got together?

Richard Canny is a very smart guy when it comes to cars and especially electric vehicles. He’s been a big cheese at Ford as well as CEO of Think, the funky EV company - he has been both David and Goliath.

So when he writes that the smaller electric vehicle companies and the big car manufacturers should consider going into partnership together we should take notice.

We’ve recently seen Modec go under, and soon Londoners won’t be able to buy the G-Whiz anymore. It would be a crying shame if the most pioneering EV brands failed for lack of muscle.

Collaboration – not competition – is fast emerging as the default business operating system for those brands that are shaping the future. I don’t mean collaboration with consumers (like BMW’s new car share scheme) but producer collaboration (like Vattenfall and Volvo) - what we might call ‘upstream collaboration’ - sharing smarts, technology, r&d to forge new businesses and create new categories.

And when the collaborators are David and Goliath the potential is huge – Tesla + Daimler, AOL + Huffington, Green and Blacks + Cadbury, Unilever + Ben & Jerry’s, Will.i.am + Intel, Aardman + Sony, and not forgetting Vice + WPP (the latter conjuring images of Sir Martin Sorrell at a rave).

It’s the new way of doing business.

(Nick Keppel-Palmer)

Our friends electric

Last week one of the UK’s brightest stars got snuffed out. Modec was a maker of funky electric commercial vehicles – near silent delivery trucks that the likes of Tesco, UPS and FedEx had started using. (You really have to look both ways before crossing the roads nowadays).

Electric Vehicle technology may not provide all the answers to sustainable mobility – but few will deny that it’s a pretty important area. But the most interesting and forward thinking players are small, starved of capital and seemingly perpetually teetering on the brink. ThinkEV, Tesla, BetterPlace, REVA – all really exciting companies, all well respected, none of them more than niche. Meanwhile the mass manufacturers like Renault see Electric Vehicles as a source of future differentiation and therefore something to be protected and defended at all costs. Getting all paranoid about putative Chinese spies under the bed.

Why get so competitive about it? Why not collaborate? The world needs sustainable mobility, and the means to achieving it stretch way beyond the resources of one company. Think how much more the auto industry could achieve – together – if all the players dropped their ‘default competition’ mode and started thinking in ‘default collaboration’ mode. The most forward thinking brands in the world are those that understand clearly the role that they play, rather than obsess about the ‘position’ they are defending.  They seek out partners who share their aims and they work with them to achieve their common aims. Think Boots and Macmillan; M&S and Oxfam;  Kate Moss & Topshop; Nokia and Microsoft; Tata and Docomo; iphone and google maps; and even Heston Blumenthal and Little Chef. This is the end of competition as a business model.

Getting electric vehicles into the mass day-to-day market requires a massive sharing of resources (smarts, technology and money) if it’s going to happen at anything more than a snail’s pace. And we need it - fast. Fuel prices are heading skywards. But without a fundamental change of thinking in the boardrooms of the automotive oligopoly it won’t happen fast enough.

I hope Modec is an exceptional case. I fear it isn’t. 

(Nick Keppel-Palmer)