The C3 Group’s 2016 Connected Mobility Summit at Dogpatch Studios on October 20 in San Francisco was a resounding success. The event gathered the top thought leaders and stakeholders in connected mobility and attracted high-level media and other attendees for a series of engaging presentations and panel discussions and cutting-edge technology demos that shed new insight into the monumental paradigm shift occurring in transportation and mobility.

C3 Group President and Cofounder Doug Newcomb kicked off the event by stating that “technology is transforming transportation in the same way it’s transformed media, music and other industries.”

This was followed by Ford’s Sudipto Aich sharing the automaker’s  vision for Driving City Solutions as part of its ambitious Smart Mobility initiative. Aich’s presentation preceded the opening panel, moderated by San Francisco Associate Transportation Planner Danielle Harris, that focused on Making Cities and Urban Mobility Smarter. Panelists shared their ideas on how technology will help shape transportation and the cities of the future.

The next panel, Which Transportation Start-Ups Have Staying Power, centered on the rapid growth of venture capital investing in the mobility space and featured some of Silicon Valley’s top VC firms.  Panel Moderator Jeffrey Schox of Trucks Venture Capital and a Stanford Associate Professor, posited the concept of companies emerging as the “Dell of car manufacturers,” with consumers going online and piecing together the features and technology they look for in a car, resulting in a custom built, made-to-order vehicle. Panelist also made predictions about the future of ride-sharing companies such as Uber and Lyft.

C3’s Doug Newcomb moderated the third panel, The Next-Generation of In-Dash Technology and Content. Topics covered included the importance of display technology given the amount of information drivers are now presented with, and how the aftermarket fits into the new transportation environment. Ted Cardenas of Pioneer Electronics suggested that the aftermarket is essential to the transition to help today’s cars share the road with vehicles of the future.

Karl Brauer of Cox Automotive kicked off the final panel with an eye-opening presentation on technological realities vs. consumer perception of self-driving cars, followed by the final panel discussion, that fielded tough questions around the unintended consequences of autonomous cars. C3 Group’s CEO David Robinson led the lively panel including Avery Ash of INRIX , Dawn Manley of Samsung, Ryan Hilton of Quid, and Cox’s Karl Brauer who noted, “We are in the early stages of a paradigm shift in transportation technology.”

During a networking break and closing reception, attendees had the opportunity to check out tech exhibits such as Hyundai’s highly-anticipated new IONIQ hybrid, Ford’s Chariot vans and GoBikes, HERE’s 3-D scale model of San Francisco showing the company’s location intelligence technology in action and Pioneer’s aftermarket solutions that bring consumers’ digital lifestyle into any car’s dashboard.

Brauer summed up one of the key takeaways from the evening, focusing on how technology and consumer choices are driving disruption in urban mobility, by concluding that, “The reality is that for the next 10 years, autonomous vehicles will be sharing the road with older, driven vehicles and creating a unique situation, that will be phased out with time.”

Grant Courville, Senior Director of Product Management for Automotive and General at‎ BlackBerry and a panelist,  noted that his favorite part of the event was the networking, which is always an important and valuable staple of C3 events. The evolution and development of the transportation disruption “cannot be proprietary,” Courville added, and “events like this are imperative” to everyone’s success.

The C3 Group would like to thank our sponsors for their support, including Hyundai, Ford, Pioneer, HERE, Continental, AAA, Kelley Blue Book, Vinli, Gracenote, Bosch, QNX, INRIX and GetGeeked.