Could Autolib’ Transform the City of Lights into a City of Electric Vehicles?

Recent interview published on cityfix:

France wants to take the lead in the new electrified vehicle industry. The 2007 Grenelle Environnement (a multi-party roundtable to define public policy in France) helped to shape the country’s sustainable development strategy. The stimulus plan at the end of 2008 emphasized this effort by establishing an 800 million-euro fund for sustainable development grants, partly to help create a greener automotive industry

Now, global industrial leaders such as the Renault-Nissan alliance and EDF, the French electric utility, want to define what could be the future of the country’s Electric Mobility Operator (EMO), which would supply customers with the infrastructure needed to recharge and manage electric vehicles. At the same time, technology- or service-driven companies are emerging as innovators. What we can call not only an electrified vehicle value chain but, more broadly, a sustainable mobility constellation is changing the way we sell cars.

To paraphrase François Mitterrand, natural selection will occur between business models, not between technologies. Among all models emerging, we can  divide them into three extensive categories: the carsharing model, the battery leasing model, and the EMO model (Better Place, for example.)

French Solar Photovoltaic Market is “a new Chinese” market

For much of the past decade, policy-driven demand in a series of champion markets has driven the growth of the global PV industry. Successively, Japan, Germany and then Spain fueled the PV market growth. Now, secondary markets such as the French one are poised to take off.

Specificity of this market is its uncertainty. Uncertain markets throw out a steady stream of opportunities and threats. In these environments, companies succeed to the extent that executives and the organization are able to respond to shifting circumstances. Analysing the speed of market growth, the ever changing competition structure and regulatory framework, French PV market possess everything of what we saw in numerous industries in China this last decade. Here is what we can learn from them:

Impressionist culture shock

Imagine a country where:

-  You can be stopped 12 times by ‘customs’ service during a 5 hours travel. That’s how you can first assess how free trade is taken into consideration.

-  Investment concept is just a terra incognita word. Switching from a day to day P&L culture to an investment and ROI culture can be a tough one sometimes.

-  Drinking nine green teas per day is a minimum requirement. That helps to turn oceans of data available to islands of insight, they say.