Consulting, research and speaking

Consulting

Advisory engagements cover how automated transportation affects operational, business and revenue models; the development of policies, strategies and plans around it; the underlying technologies and realistic deployment paths for them; and the identification of business models that capture the benefits while limiting exposure to the downside.

The work is most useful to organisations whose exposure is indirect — insurers, fleet operators, logistics businesses, municipal authorities, property and infrastructure owners. These are the parties for whom automated driving is a change in operating conditions rather than a product decision, and for whom the vendor literature is close to useless because it is written for buyers of vehicles.

Research

Collaboration with research organisations and funders on studies that improve the understanding of automated transportation and its underlying technologies, including work to identify opportunities in hardware, software and services. The report library indicates the kind of public literature this work sits alongside.

Public speaking

Conference and corporate presentations on the near-term future of automated transportation, current developments and trends, and their consequences for a specific industry or audience. Sessions can be pitched at general business audiences or at technical ones, and are more useful when the brief names the audience's actual exposure rather than asking for a survey of the field.

Who this is not for

Organisations looking for confirmation that automated vehicles will transform their sector within three years will find the work unsatisfying. The record does not support that timeline and has not for a decade — the deployments that exist are real, commercially operating and confined to bounded operating areas, and the useful planning question is which bounded domains touch a given business and when.

Vehicle manufacturers and tier-one suppliers are generally better served by their own engineering functions. The value here is for organisations whose exposure is second-order and who therefore have nobody internally tracking it.

What the record actually supports

Any honest engagement starts from a position that clients rarely want to hear: the deployments that exist are real, commercially operating and confined to tightly bounded operating areas, and that has been the shape of the industry for several years. The useful planning question is therefore not when general autonomy arrives. It is which bounded domains touch a given business, on what permit timeline, and what changes when they do.

That reframing is where most of the value sits, because it converts an unanswerable forecasting question into a tractable one about specific routes, specific jurisdictions and specific asset lives.

How the engagement usually runs

Most work begins by separating what is deployed from what is announced, because that distinction does most of the analytical work and is surprisingly hard to establish from trade coverage. The deployment tracker and the disengagement analysis exist partly because that groundwork has to be redone for every engagement otherwise.

From there the work is specific to the organisation: which parts of its operating model assume a human in the vehicle, which of its assets change value, which regulatory decisions it should be tracking, and on what timeline any of it becomes actionable. Enquiries go through the contact page.