 Good morning. I was promised there would be marshmallows, but okay. So it seems really poignant, right? That on the last day of slush, this is when we talk about the future of mobility, makes total sense, maybe in a few hours, maybe in a day or two, most of us in this room will be in a carpooling vehicle, in a bus, in a van, in a plane, on a ferry, on a train, on a tram, and hey, maybe even a combination of all of those things. So mobility matters, and not just for people who wanna get to really cool tech conferences, and not just for people who grew up still waiting for the flying cars from back to the future. The future of mobility matters most because it's not just about mobility. It's about the impact that it'll have and in cities most of all. So if you think about the constant noise, you think about the bumper to bumper traffic, you think about the air pollution, and the truth is that there still aren't very many places in the world where urban mobility solutions matches the public aspirations for how to efficiently get people or things from A to B. Ways that are safe, that are clean, that are reliable, and that are affordable. So today, what we're going to be asking is, what does mobility hold for us, 10 years down the road? What are the driving forces taking is there? Should we really reinvent the wheel? And also, will I run out of transport puns before the end of this panel? Anyway, so to get to the bottom of this, we have the future of mobility will be discussed by the people who will actually be creating it, which is very exciting, from a government perspective, we have Karima Deli right in front of me. Karima Deli is a member of European Parliament, chairwoman of the European Parliament's Transport and Tourism Committee. Fun fact about Karima, she handled the report on sustainable urban mobility right when the Volkswagen scandal broke out, which is one of the many things that drove her to specialize in the future of air pollution and the future of mobility. Then we have Marcus Claesson, who currently serves as the Chief Information Officer of Daimler Trucks, buses, and vans. Prior to assuming this position, he was Group CIO of Electrolux and CEO of Electrolux IT Solutions, having the full responsibility for development, delivery, and governance on a global scale. I'm particularly excited to have Marcus here with us, not just because he brings in the corporate perspective, but because, seriously guys, most of the modern motor car, as we know it today, was developed by Benzen Daimler. So there's gonna be a bit of a history lesson there. And last but not the least, our guest is Nicolas Brousson. Nicolas became CEO of Bla Bla Car just a little over a year ago, actually, in 2016. But he has been leading the company's global operations and international growth since at least 2011. As a COO, he drives Bla Bla Car's corporate development and has successfully led the company's various rounds of financing and acquisitions. In the event there are actually still people in the room who don't know Bla Bla Car, they're one of the world's largest carpooling services. Now you're supposed to embody the startup perspective, actually, although I'm not sure if you're still technically, Bla Bla Car's still technically a startup. So yes, the latest round of funding values for the company at 1.4 billion. So to get warmed up, warmed up, I'm gonna start with a very easy question. What city are each of you from? You can just maybe left or right, right or left. Marcus? I'm now based in Stuttgart, in Germany. Stuttgart, city, what city are you from? Or do you live in? From. Okay. I'm French, I'm sorry. I think it's a country, so Paris. Okay, so hold that thought. What I want you to do is I want you to picture yourselves in your current cities, nine to 10 years from now. You know, it's 8.30 a.m., roughly the equivalent of a rush hour today in 2017, and you need to get to your first meeting. How do you get there? Maybe you can start with Nicola. I think what I'd love to do, if I need to get to my first meeting, would be probably to cycle. Okay. So if we can do that in a city, that'd be pretty cool. So cycling. I'm not sure I'm gonna talk about bikes later on, but that's what I'd love to do. Well, at least it's been said, because the future of mobility can and shouldn't involve bikes, Karima. Good morning, everyone. I hope you are. I know the night was very short, but for your question, all people imagine tomorrow they can use a flying car, a very important transport, E-pel loop with Elmer Elon Musk. I believe tomorrow you have the choice. No losing your time, because we have a lot of emergency. So tomorrow the mobility will be low carbon, inclusive, it means accessible to everyone. And safety, because at this moment we have even the raw accident, it is too much. Okay. And if you could pick just one, like on that day in particular to get to your meeting, would it be the bike? The bike. The bike. Our winners. Yeah. All right, Marcus, it's okay, no peer pressure. You don't have to say bike. How do you get to your meeting from Stuttgart? So I think we are going to still need some cars around. And we'll talk a lot about case, a diameter connected, autonomous, sharing and electric. And I think I'll get into one of those vehicles, which once I've arrived at my destination can be shared and used by somebody else. Okay. I mean, I think there's some general consensus here about the fact that we're going towards greener and shareable solutions. The question is maybe what or how? I think I'm going to ask Nicola one of the first questions on that. So, you know, Bla Bla Car has grown enormously and we're seeing a lot of different trends like Karima mentioned, flying cars, hyperloop, you know, they're gyroscopic copters, they're Lexus's hoverboards, Martens jet packs. For you in the future, could you maybe name one trend that we're seeing we're talking about in the media today that is total BS and another one that you would personally, you know, where you would personally invest in. So, I mean, maybe before we go there, right, if you take a step back on how people have been traveling over the last 10, 20, almost 50 years, what we tend to forget is most people travel by car, right? So, when you think of countries like France and Germany, you tend to think like, you know, people are going to take the train or they'll take the bus. In fact, like 80% of mobility on distances between 50 and 600 kilometers, which is kind of what we serve on Bla Bla Car, is done by car. So, you know, if you take a time machine and not in the future, but in the past, five, 10 years ago, the only way you would travel from, like let's say, you know, Hamburg to Berlin or Paris to Lyon, you take a train because Deutsche Bahn or SNSF would dominate the entire passenger transport on rail or you take your own car alone. Today you have lots of choices, right? So you can take a train, you have several train companies, you have several bus companies, you have Bla Bla Car, you have over sharing services. So clearly it's becoming more and more complex for passengers, but I think the car was central to the last 50 years and will be central to the next 50 years. So for sure I agree that the car is going to be central to all of that. And we're probably going to a future where, so I guess a trend I would bank on, but it's not a big surprise. Everybody would bank on that. It's just like one to bank on it, autonomous car. So clearly your cars are going to become increasingly electric, increasingly autonomous. And I believe in a future where it's going to be about shared autonomous vehicle. Because if you think of the Bla Bla Car paradigm, essentially we manage to educate people to share their car. So we're talking about 50 million members on a global scale, still growing very fast. But once the car is autonomous and it's like tracked and it's very easy and accidents are a thing of the past, it becomes even more shareable. So I would say like in 10, 20, 30 years, all the cars are going to be shared and the big game is going to be how do you pull people into the car? How do you pull the thing together, right? Maybe a trend that, I mean there are lots of trends that are just like a bit crazy. Actually a quick example on that, if you look at the past, it's always interesting to see like how bad we've been at predicting. Okay. So to me like in the 60s, two things happened, right? We had a man on the moon in 69. And we had Moore, the co-founder of Intel saying, Moore's law says that computing power is going to double every year or every couple of years. If you look like 30 years later, think of, we talked about like space like in the 60s and 70s and you look at science fiction, we should be in space already, we not. But computing power has changed the world. So maybe we should kind of keep our predictions a little bit more in a safe side. We don't get things wrong in a big way. Well actually, predictions are kind of part of your job now more because for how to CIO the future of Daimler, the future of this industry is something that you think about actively because it's also a really new position. How long has it been? So I joined the company in January this year. January. So I'm fairly new still to automotive and still learning but it's a very interesting industry and fascinating in many ways. And as we heard yesterday in the opening speech from Al Gore, we are working on some other worlds and mankind's biggest problems to solve. And that attracted me to the company. And the other thing that also attracted me is the cultural change in the company. We're opening up much more. We're engaging much more. We're reaching out to startups. We're connecting to the startup scene, to the VCs and so on. Because we understand and I think any large corporation that has been around for like us 130 years has to reinvent itself. And that's where we are. We are about to reinvent ourselves deeply and fundamentally and that makes it super exciting. And of course we need people like this in this room to join us in that effort, right? Okay, so I heard you said the S word startup which is maybe going to give the floor to Karima on this one because I think what I really admire about your work is that startups play an enormous role in how you see the future of the mobility ecosystem. And you're about to launch the European Startup Mobility Prize. Could you, there are a lot of startups in this room. I was wondering maybe you could give them a bit of an elevator pitch. Can I stay there? Yeah, of course. Yeah, I decided to create the European Startup Prize for mobility because we have a lot of emergency. Climate change, accessibility, safety and air pollution. Air pollution is responsible on 500 per meter days per year in Europe. We do something about this and I'm sure here you are working on transportation or mobility so we can now find the solution. And it's why European Startup Prize is your change. You can make, you make a speech for the European Parliament and you win one year, one year with a business and illegal coaching including European tool in the five European major capitals. So this prize is for you, why? Because Europe is your new playground so it's very easy. Go to the web startup.eu and to click the button and to apply. Just a one minute and it's now, thank you. There you go, okay. Kim has been to a lot of demo days. So this is actually a really important piece of the puzzle. And we're talking about a competition really more as a catalyst but when you and I were talking on the phone we're like actually there are two important things that need to be addressed if really you want to bring in a lot of younger and you were mobility players of the space. The first is neither of them are sexy. The first is procurement because it'd be great if startups could win a little bit more than just a competition and could actually come into the bids. And the second one that we talked about is the data infrastructure that will be surrounding all of this shared mobility. Could you maybe tell us a little bit about the vision of the European Union around that? Okay. All we know is very hard for startups to access to the public tenders. These governments, the government driving calls for projects and we have a lot of money behind. And it's not fair. It's not fair. Why I say that? Because whole man politician snob you startups. Because they see you as a young geek with no actual economic vision. That's the reason why I create this startup prize. It's a time to show we can push the successful and the userful for the startups is a future I believe in mobility and for data because we talk about data. We have a little battle with a traditional mobility player about data. The question is who wants it? And data for me, for mobility is like water for human beings. Water in several countries was privatized and it's hard for poor people, very poor people to have access. So for me, Europe, in Europe we decide the opposite. Water is a good public. That's the reason why now data, we need data horizontal. Data is not a vertical line business and we need to open data. We need a flag ground is now to help startup for mobility. But when we're talking about, you're talking about autonomous self-driving cars, we're gonna need a lot more than just a bunch of CSVs stuck to an open government platform. Actually Daimler's been doing some really interesting work on this front. I've been following a little bit of movable and how you're leveraging a lot of SDKs and moving a lot more towards a platform mindset. Can you maybe tell us a little bit about this and how it fits into in the future of what you're trying to do? Well, yes, I mean it's part of that reinventing of our company and our business, extending our business models beyond the product itself into the ecosystem and looking for those opportunities. I myself represent, as you said, truck, bus and van. And if you look at logistics, for example, it's a huge opportunity. For now, our focus is around making our customers successful in the sense that the product doesn't break down. There is a low TCO, total cost ownership, to operate the vehicle, et cetera. But in the future, it's much more around how do we actually optimize the entire end-to-end. And I think whether you talk about logistics end-to-end or whether you talk about your personal journey end-to-end, you have a lot of parallels there. And that's what's becoming interesting for us to explore in this kind of environment to open up and to take those impulses and transform those into new models that works for us as well. No, I mean, that's great. And actually, I'm gonna give to Florence and Nicola now, not just because a newspaper leak that you had been forming a data alliance with a lot of public transporters, but also that you're going into short distance mobility as well with blah, blah lines, which requires an enormous amount of data compared to your long-distance solution. Maybe you could tell the public a little bit more about blah, blah lines and how it fits in your vision. Yeah, no, so essentially we, as you know, we started blah, blah car and essentially we educated people on shared mobility but pretty much on long distance, right? So it was people doing Paris to Lyon or Munich to Hamburg and this type of journeys. We never really solved, with blah, blah car, the commuting angle. It's like people going daily to work. So in France, I think it's about like 14 million people every day, take their car, go to work. Car occupancy actually in commuting is 1.1. In France it's the same in every country in Europe, so it's absurd. So it means that you carry three empty seats every day to work. So we decided to tackle that. We launched a new product called blah, blah lines, which is the same concept philosophically as blah, blah car. So it's about shared mobility but applied to your daily commute. What's interesting there is you know, blah, blah car was more of a, you can develop that as a standalone community. Blah, blah line gets much closer to existing public transport. So we try to integrate that into public transport. We need to share some data with existing public transport. So today on blah, blah lines we can show you like, you know, essentially you have a metro getting you to a stop and then maybe a car is going to take you for the last couple of miles, for example. So if we crack that, that's pretty fundamental because if you're just able to increase car occupancy on commuting, you're going to reduce traffic enormously. You're going to connect all kinds of points on a map that are not connected. So if you look at data today, I mean to me you have different type of data. You have all the existing transport data, which is like the timetable of the trams and the metro and so on. And you have consumer data, like where people are exactly going to and when. So we gathering that essentially, right? We're pretty good at understanding where passengers really want to go. And today like public transport, they're pretty good at knowing what they've built and the timetable of the metro and the tram, but they don't really know where people end up going at the end of the day. So if we can work together and map that together, that's pretty powerful. And today we get, especially on blah, blah lines, we get actually pulled by cities. So we get some help by the city of Paris and we get like even a subsidy of two euro per ride from the city of Paris. So that's when the old like private public sector kind of emerged together, right? Because we end up getting some subsidies to launch blah, blah lines. So I'm curious about that because at the same time, what you're doing is you're lowering the cost of transport and you are algorithmically replacing bus stops. To what extent are you also disrupting public transport then as opposed to joining it? I think you do a bit of both, right? So does it complement the existing network? Yes. Is it gonna partially replace the existing network? Possibly. But I think it's a mix of the two and you don't know to what extent. And at the end of the day, it should be consumer-led, right? So if it's easier for a passenger to jump into a car, pay three euro, go to work, come back in a car and that car is going anyway, it's just going empty. That's probably a better thing for the driver, a better thing for the passenger, a better thing for traffic, a better thing for the environment. So at some point, I think it's gonna work itself out, right? It needs to be very consumer-driven as opposed to maybe more regulatory-driven or transport system-driven. Okay. I can see the time that's moving a little bit and we actually have a, so this thing is questions from the audience and there's one question that was obviously going to come up at some point and it's about, will somebody drive cars and will people still be driving cars in the future? We've addressed this to a certain extent but I know Marcus is a very spignal angle to this. If we're talking about shared transport, we're talking about services and ride-nailing companies and things like that, then what is the future of individual transportation when this happens? What's the future of Daimler when this happens or if it happens? Well, I mean, horses used to be the main sort of mean of transportation. At one point in time, and people still ride horses, right? Yeah. Phew, safe. So, well, it's difficult to predict how these new models, business models and ways of transporting goods and people will evolve. And to be honest, I think that's what we're here, to co-innovate, to co-create and to define that future together. It's true it's a lot less straight cut than I thought, actually on the tram, on the way here, I was looking up some of the numbers and contrary to what we think about the decline in car sales and things like that, Mercedes declared 18% growth and a sales record. So clearly there's some things that haven't quite been mapped out yet. So we have four minutes and I think I'm going to ask one general question to sort of close it. Nikola was talking earlier about the 60s back when everything was about the car and now the car is part of a much larger puzzle. And back then, we were talking about insurance, roads, bridges, gas stations, roadside stores, roadside hotels, an entire infrastructure that was built around when cars as they were at the time were the center. In the future of an integrated mobility system, what do you think is one piece, like one key piece that we need for it to come about? But yeah, maybe to jump back, I mean I'll partially answer, but to jump back on the discussion on the future of cars. I mean to me one thing that's pretty obvious is yes cars will become autonomous. So the question is not really like, are they going to become autonomous? It's more like when and who's going to control what? Who's going to control the operating system in the car? An interesting debate though, and you were talking about like trends that might not happen, I'm very dubious about the fact that essentially people will not own cars, for example. So I wrote some articles on that and I think in like 10, 20, 50 years, even though you have autonomous vehicle, people will still own cars or lease cars or have access to a car all the time. So I don't think we'll go into a car ownership model where all the cars in a country are going to be owned by two or three players. A, because it makes zero economic sense for a company to have like tons of cars on the balance sheet. So it makes no sense. A number two, a distributed system is probably a better system. And the trend you talk about about car sale is very true. I think car sales are not going down. And if you look at like every new car that's closer to autonomy like Tesla, you have like a one year backlog to buy some of these cars. The first company that's going to release an autonomous car is going to have like a backlog of like a couple of years to sell that car. So I think people will still own car. They're just going to be shared a lot more. So we're going to stay in a world of distributed ownership of cars and they're going to be again, like shared a lot more through car sharing, ride sharing. And we're going to increase car occupancy and car usage this way. Okay. What about you, Karima? I believe the biggest game changer is for car. I believe an individual car will be disappear because, yeah, because, yeah, really, because... The two French people, we have to debate, of course. Yeah, but I believe really individual car is in no sense. You talk about autonomous car. I'm totally agree with you. But the problem at this moment, we have a lot of emergency when you talk about autonomous car. We have the issue of cybersecurity, legal responsible and data. Don't forget that. So I believe the future for the car. Really? I'll turn you in, Marcus. And I believe really we have a lot of... Center city should be more carless. So the future of the car is to share. So we want to create a new economy, collaborative economy, like blah, blah car. I don't say that because it's my neighbor, but it's true. But we don't forget. We have other... We have other, for example, with Uber, et cetera. At the European level, it's not the same. Uber is an economic platform, and blah, blah car is a collaborative platform, collaborative economy, because we don't have the same system. So for your question very quickly, I believe tomorrow when public transport need to be a public platform. So transport on demand must, I believe must a better role in the transport public. So a new link between, for example, bug sharing, car sharing, et cetera. And if you look at this jumping for one sec on what you say, what we've done with blah, blah car in a way, we took the car, the private car, and we kind of make that public transport because you share it. So I agree that the car won't be individual, in the sense that you share it, but I think car ownership is gonna remain like owned by people. So we're at the end of our time, which means that Marcus, you will have the great honor of closing the panel with a few words that will echo. Just a couple of final comments. And I think the digital disruption, what we've seen is that it makes people's lives easier in many ways. So I'm with you. It will integrate different means of transportation and sharing is absolutely an element of that. And yeah, very exciting future in that sense, seamless and turned and optimized. Okay, well, maybe you'll join me in giving our speakers a round of applause. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you.