At the PlanetM panel on Smart Cities hosted at the NAIAS on Thursday (Jan. 18), the moderator joked that anyone who didn’t know what V2X meant should leave the AutoMobili-D floor and go upstairs to look at the cars. Sure, this was during Press Week, but the question remains: do enough consumers know what is being talked about in the realm of mobility technologies to be able to make informed decisions? So here is a brief list of terms that I picked up during the week at NAIAS. Some I was familiar with, some I wasn’t.
I visited San Francisco recently and, unsurprisingly, took an Uber from the airport to my final destination. On the drive, we had a standard passenger-driver conversation: where we were from, how long had he been driving Uber, when was the last time I had been to the city. It took me by surprise to learn that my driver lived in Sacramento, California’s capital city located an hour and a half northeast of San Francisco.
Press Week for the North American International Auto Show kicked off on Sunday January 14 at Cobo Center in the heart of downtown Detroit. Among the largest auto shows in North America, NAIAS has been running since 1907. This year is the second to feature AutoMobili-D, a showcase of the ecosystem of companies and technologies that are changing the landscape of mobility as we know it.
By Julianna Tschirhart