Fast Forward

Hosted by CoMotion

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Episodes

182

Latest episode

Oct 2026

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About the show

Fast Forward is a bi-weekly podcast covering the revolution in urban mobility. Hosted by urban researcher Nick Perloff-Giles, each episode features a guest on the front lines of the transformation in transportation, along with fun and incisive commentary on that week’s news. Visit www.comotionla.com to find out more about our flagship gathering convening the top players shaping the future of mobility.

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60 recent

October 22, 202628 min

Flying the Hybrid Skies with Kevin Noertker

Decarbonizing aviation has proven to be tougher than initially anticipated - but what if that's because hopes have been set too high? In this episode, host Nick Perloff-Giles sits down with Kevin Noertker, CEO and co-founder of Ampaire, an aviation company retrofitting existing planes with hybrid engines that cut costs by 50-70% while significantly reducing emissions, to talk about the policy, technological, and mechanical constraints to transforming flying.

October 6, 202633 min

Building the Curb of the Future with Gene Oh

The curb is under more demand than ever - cyclists need a place to park, vehicles need a place to charge, and AVs suddenly need a place to stop. But the curbs we have are far from the curbs we need: so how do we get there? On this episode, host Nick Perloff-Giles sits down with Gene Oh of Tranzito, an urban mobility and smart city operator that specializes in curbside management, secure bike parking, and multimodal transportation infrastructure, to discuss the opportunities for curbs ahead, and the challenges that lie in between.

September 24, 202625 min

A Decade of CoMotion Challenge Winners with Tiya Gordon and Dan Lafferty

With less than 2 months until CoMotion LA 2026, we look back at some of the new mobility challenge winners from the last decade to catch up on their progress and identify strategies to make the perfect pitch.

September 10, 202623 min

Breaking Through Multifamily Charging with Jeremy Cohen

Nearly 40 million people in the United States live in a multifamily building, where EV charging access has to be shared. But the majority of both funding and infrastructure devoted to charging is still either in the roadway or in single family homes. What's an apartment-dweller to do? Enter SWTCH Energy, which rapidly scales the EV charging network in multifamily and commercial buildings; host Nick Perloff-Giles sat down with Jeremy Cohen, Head of Real Estate Partnerships, to talk about the challenges of compliance, the future of charging, and what's in store for the market more broadly. Click here to learn more about CoMotion LA and get a 10% discount on tickets: https://events.bizzabo.com/845187?promo=FASTFORWARD

August 27, 202621 min

Fleets Take the Wheel with Bojan Jukic

While Waymo and other autonomous players continue to expand, they're running into a much older problem: how to manager their growing fleets. That's the slow, complicated, unsexy part of running mobility services that involves cleaning, charging, and moving vehicles around to where they need to be, and that's the business Bojan Jukic, CEO of Wunder Mobility, is in. On this episode, he and host Nick Perloff-Giles talk about how the micromobility revolution predicted autonomy, what Europe is doing well, and what the future holds for fleet management.

August 13, 202631 min

The Future of Batteries is Shared with David Hammer

Battery fires are a nagging (and growing) problem in New York City: while they've fueled the e-mobility-enabled rise of delivery apps like Doordash, they often exist in black market, underregulated spaces, where fires are common. But what if you disintermediated the system, by offering shared batteries swappable at a moment's notice? That's the model of PopWheels. Fast Forward host Nick Perloff-Giles sat down with co-founder David Hammer to discuss the company's success in moving towards a shared, safer battery future.

July 28, 202613 min

10 Years of CoMotion with former Mayor of Los Angeles Eric Garcetti

CoMotion has been in downtown Los Angeles for 10 years - in that time, self-driving cars have filled the roads, delivery robots crawl the sidewalks, and slowly but surely, a subway network is emerging. In this special retrospective conversation, founder and chief curator John Rossant sits down with former Mayor of Los Angeles and Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti for a discussion on what's changed in the last decade in the city, and what lies ahead.

July 16, 202637 min

The Future of Financing in the Gulf with Michael Mueller

On this episode, CoMotion founder and CEO John Rossant sits down with Michael Mueller of TASARU Mobility Investments, a Saudi Arabian fund looking at the future of mobility in the Gulf and beyond. They discuss current bottlenecks for new mobility deployment, what's specific about the regional context of Saudi Arabia, and how the country and fund are adapting strategies from around the world to innovate.

July 2, 202652 min

The World Cup is Here, the Olympics are Coming... is LA Prepared?

Imagine 7 super bowls in your city, every day, for sixteen days. That's what LA is poised to deal with when the Olympics arrive in 2028. How is the World Cup helping them prepare? On this special miniseries episode of the Fast Forward podcast, host Nick Perloff-Giles sits down with experts, advocates, and researchers Alissa Walker, Eli Lipmen, and Juan Matute to discuss everything that's gone right (and wrong) with the transportation planning of the World Cup, and everything to come for the Olympics.

June 17, 202626 min

Building at the Neighborhood Level with Vanessa Velasco

What if our urban planning started not with a metro stop or apartment, but with a neighborhood as the unit of analysis? On this episode, guest host and CoMotion co-founder Tim Gribaudi sits down with Vanessa Velasco, Habitat Chief Secretary of Bogota, to talk about her efforts to address Bogota's affordable housing through acquisition, home improvement, and rental housing programs. The ambitious plan aims to allocate 75,000 affordable housing subsidies and provide financing incentives to address the substantial housing deficit in Bogota.