Annual Chronicle 2022: “The Future Car Park Vision Is Validated and the Marketplace Is in Sight”

It's been an interesting year. That's the first thing I feel when I sit down to write this year's chronicle. We have a product and a team that is stronger than ever. The Mobility family has received the addition of three back-end developers - Peter, Oleg and Ivan - in what we called “Tech Rebuild”, which aimed, among other things, to create redundancy within our tech team. In addition, some really exciting collaborations have been started during the year. The fact that several large players, such as Vaskronan, Parkman and SBB, have chosen to become our customers is great. It is a confirmation of the thesis that contract parking must also be digitized and a validation of the vision “The Future Car Park”.

“The passion and commitment I see among our employees makes me filled with energy and deeply grateful.”

-- John Asp

At the same time, a lot is happening in the outside world. Russia has invaded Ukraine, the electricity crisis is a fact and we are heading into a recession, with the PMI index at 45.8 in November - the fourth month in a row below 50. All this together leaves us facing a 2023 in which much is unclear. But one thing is certain: the passion and commitment I see among our employees — both for each other, for our customers and for the world around us — makes me filled with energy and deeply grateful. I must work harder to protect the Mobility family and create stable financial conditions for Mobility46 to continue to develop.

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2022 — the year of cooperation

Perhaps 2022 could be called the Year of Collaboration. Partly because this year we have started interesting collaborations with both customers and partners, but also because it feels like the industry has matured in that this is exactly what we are going to do. Collaborate. The notion that “I do everything myself or else it should be” is outdated.

As I described a couple of years ago “The Future Car Park” is about the fact that everything around mobility, electric car charging and parking (and why not also smart building and energy optimization) needs to be connected. In order for this to become a reality, not one actor can do everything, but everyone who works in any branch of this must cooperate. Specifically, this means, for example, technical integrations and open APIs — and here we go.

“The Future Car Park is no longer a desktop product. Our tech teams are now connecting all parts of the value chain.”

-- John Asp

Now we have contract parking management in a system with a data model and an API externally. There are paid apps for visitor parking with API that share data. We connect with charge actors across OCPI and OCPP. On the ANPR page, we also start sharing data. And we have a data hub that collects all the above mentioned data and visualizes it for the best possible decision basis.

So The Future Car Park — with cameras, contracts, visits, charging, accesser and data — is no longer just a desktop product and a fancy powerpoint presentation. Our tech team now has Slack channels with the respective tech teams of our integration partners, and they now connect all parts of the value chain. And we have major property owners and operators who are involved and pressure test this for real. It's super exciting!

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A Decline in Electrification

There is no way to write a 2022 annual chronicle without doing a clampdown on electrification. During the year, the share of rechargeable passenger cars among new registrations has passed 50%, and the total number exceeds 400,000. That's 8% of our passenger car fleet.

At the same time, the green car premium was removed after the last parliamentary elections and the rising electricity prices are on everyone's lips. How this affects households and the continued electrification, we will have to keep an eye on in 2023. Can there be an extra push in the direction with multiple shared electric vehicle pools — 🚀 Elbilio!

In several places, both in the public and private sectors, there has been a focus on electric car charging in 2022. Among other things, sieves SBB on building 40,000 charging points The City of Stockholm won Laddguldet for the best electric car community. One of this year's initiatives from the City of Stockholm was the innovation competition for public street charging that Waybler water. It's great fun! Stockholm parking and the City of Stockholm have really done a great job there.

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To achieve environmental goals, we need to make parking charging available to more people

However, in order to achieve environmental goals, we need to do more. And it's fast. Here, too, I am convinced that the Future Car Park is an important piece of the puzzle, because the bulk of charging will have to take place on private land. Here I would like to quote our product manager Oskar:

“The best solution for public electric car charging is to open up more people to be able to charge on private land and in private garages, when those who have parking contracts are not standing there. It's more efficient utilization of valuable surface area and much lower cost per installed socket”

— Oskar Ekman

Imagine what happens when we manage to electrify, say, 50% of the approximately 1,200,000 parking spaces available in commercial properties, the Public Utility and the BRF segment. Not to mention the private rental property owners who are already on the train. Electric car charging is being rolled out on an increasing scale everywhere, so plugging these into a system and making them available to the public is not far off. Then we can reduce the vacancies in the parking spaces, increase the utilization rate and turn these private spaces into mini-macks for electric car charging. When we get there, I promise to hand over the baton to the next leader to write the Annual Chronicle of Mobility46.

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If we turn our eyes to Europe...

All this is happening right now in Sweden. But what is it like in the rest of Europe? During the autumn we made a study visit to a conference in Switzerland to check the situation. There gathered actors from all over Europe. And from that we can see that Norway ranks first in terms of electric car charging, Sweden comes next and then we have Holland which has a lot of audience fast charging.

This means that we have some very interesting years ahead of us now. What we see happening here in the Nordic countries may well be the basis for the development that will then go even faster in other countries. It is exciting.

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In conclusion

We continue to develop the Future Car Park and now we are not far from making the vision a reality. When we started our journey eleven years ago it was out of frustration that was turned into opportunity. We saw a need to make parking, electric car charging and mobility more accessible to consumers in an easier way. Create an efficient market. And an opportunity for everyone who owns and manages parking to seize the amazing business potential of these assets. We wanted to create a marketplace where one could easily find and rent a parking space - with one click. Who knows, now it may not be far away - we have a lot of really exciting plans for 2023.

In conclusion, I would like to quote Bill Gates:

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

-- Bill Gates

Thanks for 2022!

John Asp, CEO and co-founder Mobility46