I've been lucky enough to act as an advisor to Goodwood's annual Nucleus summit since it was started by the Duke of Richmond in 2015. Described as a one-day automotive Davos, it puts the leaders of the car companies in the same room as the tech titans who seek to disrupt them, along with the investors, politicians and thinkers who also influence the New Mobility. This is an extract from a piece for the Goodwood magazine explaining the event's significance.
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 twenty-something 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 them, 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 less knowable than ever.
