In many places, the experience of taking transit is one of being “processed” or fed through a giant industrial machine. For those cities that manage to make travelling through them joyful and exciting, there’s something special that goes beyond transportation — a sense of care and functioning that even the fastest, most frequent train can’t replace.

Stations in Japan are rarely very fancy, but they feel chaotic in a good way. In New York City, the chaos of the subway is downstream of the rats, litter, mysterious liquids dripping onto the platforms, and worn concrete and steel. Japanese train and subway stations, while they often feel very old, are almost all well-lit, and filled with clearly modern touches, from bright tactile wayfinding, to the glossy plastic of newly-installed platform gates that let you get close, but not too close to the trains.

Much like in London the announcements on trains in Japan are pleasant and sound happy, but even better – transit systems are often filled with musical tunes, announcing arriving trains, or the current station. Instead of just the sound of waiting passengers and wheels sliding across ribbons of steel you actually have gentle tunes.

So instead of having to like go to an insurance company, you can go into DIMO and like type in your VIN number, and all of that is passed to them. It’s a much more seamless type of interaction that people are used to with digital services.

The lifecycle for a user at DIMO is you connect your car, we start building a digital twin of that car, and we actually pull a lot of data about from the existing marketplace about the VIN number, and we allow users to take ownership of that data. And then the whole business side of it and the developer platform that we’re kind of like re-launching in the next quarter is built on top of that. So there’s all different ways that can be expressed, but that’s kinda the high-level pitch for it.

And there’s a digital glovebox for the vehicle as well that’s going to be much more incorporated into the apps and services on top of DIMO eventually, so you’ll be able to get data back from your insurance company like, ‘here’s your registration card; here’s your policy details,’ and all of that can be organized inside of your DIMO app.

one of the bets we have with DIMO and something we think is gonna be true into the future is that it’s really not going to scale until there’s more infrastructure to support like regular operations of autonomous vehicles, and it’s a big “chicken and egg” problem. Because you can’t build a massive amount of infrastructure before you have the cars that can use it.

you’re going to have to break these trips into chunks that you can do fully autonomously

By improving home charging for urban apartment dwellers and prioritizing vehicles with smaller batteries, rather than road-trip-enabling charging stations and big batteries, we could maximize the miles we can affordably electrify. In an era of battery scarcity, we could have two 150-mile E.V.s for the battery capacity in every 300-mile E.V. Or, using the same 300-mile E.V. battery, you could have six plug-in hybrids with 50 miles of electric range for daily driving and a gasoline engine for those rarer road trips or many, many more e-bikes.

Rather than holding E.V. adoption hostage to our ability to make batteries match internal combustion in every way, government policy should focus on the cases where E.V.s have advantages that internal combustion will never match: waking up every morning with a full “tank” sufficient for daily commuting and errands.