Hi everybody. Welcome to Shift, a podcast about mobility. I'm Pete Bigelow, your host and reporter at the Automotive News.

Everybody is Leslie Allen, editor of Shift magazine, and I hope everybody's enjoying the

holiday season. Wish a happy new year. And it's Alexa St. John. is

the

the holiday season. We wish a happy new year.

And it's Alexa St. John, covering tech and suppliers.

Joining us on the podcast today is Jessica Robinson,

board chair of the Michigan Mobility Institute, and she's also a co-founder and

and she's also a co-founder and partner of Assembly Ventures.

We talked to Jessica about what the Michigan Mobility Institute is,

specific initiatives at the Institute, creating jobs in the mobility industry, and what

changes to mobility as a result of COVID are temporary, and what seems more permanent?

Well, Alexa, speaking of COVID, you know, of course,

2020 was quite a year, largely because of the pandemic,

but also, you know, we saw a lot of changes going on in the

world of mobility many of which we covered right here on this podcast for

example we saw the rise of what we're calling SPAC-Mania, which is the whole phenomenon with companies

that are startups that are going public by way of latching on to other public companies called Special Purpose Acquisition Companies or Spacks.

We also saw a variety of AV developments and of course many of which our fearless host Pete Bigelow has covered. So Pete, what would you say about the big stories of 2020?

You know, it's funny. I thought for a long time that the big story of 20 20 was about

A das aka advanced driver assistant systems because there was not a whole lot of news on the automated vehicle front

until, you know, Weimo expanded its Weimo 1 service in October.

...