THE ROAD AHEAD

Nucleus – Festival of Speed’s annual semi-secret summit – brings together leading players from the car and tech industries to discuss the future of mobility.

Ben Oliver hails the creativity and candour of the “automotive Davos”

The Goodwood Festival of Speed is now as much about the future of mobility as it is about the history of the car. The House and the Hill still reverberate to the sound of engines from the Edwardian era onwards, but the course record is now held by an electric car, and the Future Lab pavilion, where guests can mingle with humanoid robots or have their movements mimicked by artificial intelligence, is one of the Festival’s biggest draws.

Since 2015, another Goodwood event has been contributing to that future by bringing people rather than cars and tech together: the people who are remaking not only mobility, but the modern world. It isn’t publicised and is seldom discussed openly. One early delegate described it as “a one-day automotive Davos”, and it is the hottest and most exclusive ticket at the Festival of Speed.

Nucleus was the Duke of Richmond’s idea, and guests attend at his personal invitation. Each year, on the Friday of the Festival of Speed, around 30 delegates meet in the seclusion of Goodwood’s Sculpture Park to discuss the future of the car and its changing role in the new mobility. The leaders of the biggest car and technology companies attend, alongside the founders of disruptive new-mobility start-ups. Nucleus hears from those who create the technology and predict its impact; far-sighted legislators who seek to encourage as well as regulate; the financiers who fund the ideas; and an endlessly changing, surprising, diverse collection of technologists, thinkers and theorists, often from outside the world of mobility if their perspective might prove instructive.

The reinvention of mobility touches so many aspects of state and society – from the economy and technology to urban planning, ethics and the environment – that those who have the greatest influence on its future might never meet. Nucleus attempts to fix that, although many delegates say they’re lured as much by the Festival of Speed, whose old-school engines you can hear from the venue, as they are by the chance to meet their peers.

The conversation between them is creative and sometimes combative. Nucleus is held under the Chatham House Rule, by which the substance of the conversation may be reported or acted upon, but the identity of the speakers never divulged. As a result, delegates talk with often searing honesty, and express views that they might not venture in public.

The discussion is hosted and moderated by well-known broadcasters such as Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Sarah Montague, and split into three main sessions, each anchored around an interview or panel discussion followed by an open debate. Every year, the Duke of Richmond suggests a broad theme for Nucleus as well as specific topics for the debates. In previous years the event has examined the nature of disruption, the role of the state in transformative change, the uncertain progress of AI, and rising phenomena such as the metaverse and cryptocurrencies, which don’t perhaps affect mobility yet, but which might one day affect us all.

Nucleus has now been established long enough to have seen our notions of the future – automotive and otherwise – change radically. At the outset, many still thought that fully autonomous driving would arrive quickly and become widespread. The very biggest car and technology companies were actively involved in it. Their leaders came to Nucleus and admitted that making a self-driving car

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Five key insights from inside Nucleus

THE MAJOR CARMAKERS AREN’T ABOUT TO BE REPLACED

“Dead men walking.” The young leader of a tech company didn’t pull his punches when asked to describe what he thought of the car industry CEOs attending the first Nucleus. Another delegate said that half of the established carmakers represented at the event would be out of business in five years. And yet the same carmakers will be present at Nucleus again this year, still making profits and with wholly electrified product portfolios imminent. But nobody attending, whether disruptor or established player, has ever disputed that the global car industry is undergoing the biggest change in its 130-year history.

INCUMBENTS CAN’T DISRUPT

was the hardest thing they were engaged in. Those admissions were prescient and should have been heeded, because for many it turned out to be too hard. Ford, Volkswagen and Uber, among others, have cut their self-driving projects. Those that remain, such as Alphabet’s Waymo, are making slower progress than they predicted in Nucleus’s earlier years.

Delegates are also now dealing with a world radically altered since Nucleus began; not only by technological advances but by trade wars and real ones, Covid-19, geopolitical shifts, the rewiring of globalisation, reshoring and a new focus on economic security. One very senior economist and former central banker who attended Nucleus last year described it as “economic regime change”. Speaking with, at times, troubling frankness, he described how the fundamental assumptions of the past 30 years – his entire career – have begun to crumble since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with the long trend towards convergence and integration that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall now starting to unwind.

Since its inception, Nucleus has heard from and been excited by the enthusiasm of entrepreneurs who innovate unconstrained by precedent. But it has also revealed themes like those above: that technology sometimes fails to deliver or to find a use, and that tech doesn’t operate in a vacuum but is bound into the social and economic realities of the times. For every twentysomething wunderkind who attends there’s a CEO sitting alongside whose century-old global business has a turnover to match the GDP of major nations, and which has been through wars and energy crises and every other kind of disruption – and survived. The interplay between them is always fascinating. Somewhere between the two extremes, a more balanced view of the future of how we get around is to be found. And that view has never been more important than now, when the future seems more unpredictable than ever.

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The race to create the technologies that will dominate the new mobility is rigged. Tech pioneers concentrate on creating value and building a community before they start thinking about how to monetise it, and they and their backers are prepared to fail. By contrast, the CEO of a major carmaker admitted his primary focus was “to keep the cash registers ringing”. Carmakers focus on making a return on their capital investments and they have to justify their actions to shareholders, supervisory boards and employees. Transformative change is unlikely to come from employees when their reward is just a pay rise and a promotion.

Making Cars Is Hard

The one aspect of mobility that new entrants seem least interested in is car-making itself. It is difficult and prohibitively capital-intensive, and there are easier profits to be made in the systems and services that will enable the new mobility. But manufacturing can still be progressive and profitable, and those high barriers to entry will continue to protect the existing carmakers. Tesla’s travails in ramping up production prove how difficult mass manufacturing is. “What you guys do is really hard,” the leader of one tech giant told his car industry counterparts at Nucleus. “These are not dumb machines,” one leading tech investor agreed. “Silicon Valley always underestimates this.”

IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT THE TECH

State actors have a huge role to play in the coming shift in mobility, providing the physical spaces and regulations within which autonomy and other advances can be tested. Nucleus has been addressed by everyone from elected mayors who are encouraging autonomous-driving trials in their cities to representatives of the command economies, which can overcome the regulatory hurdles to autonomy with the stroke of a pen. The outcome of this change affects far more than the enterprises pioneering or resisting it. Any major shift in mobility will have a seismic impact on how and where we all live.

IF YOU THINK YOU CAN’T PREDICT THE FUTURE, YOU’RE CORRECT

Nucleus gathers the people who are defining the future of mobility, so you might expect greater clarity on what that future looks like. You’ll find little among the delegates. In fact, the only certainty is uncertainty. The early assumptions that fully autonomous driving would happen in time, or that disruptive new mobility services will continue to dominate, are constantly challenged at Nucleus, often by those who lead these enterprises. A leader of one such business told Nucleus that he thought constantly about how his business might in turn be disrupted, and how easily Google might dominate his market if it chose to.