This year’s MOVE America is modeled after a certain Swedish shopping experience, with organizers hoping you’ll stop and peruse the shelves along the way.
“It’s like the IKEA model. You have to walk through every part of IKEA to get where you need to get,” said Project Director Cormac Cronin Martin. “That’s the basic theory.”
About 200 companies will exhibit at the transportation conference, running from September 24 to 25 at Huntington Place in Detroit.
Martin and his team have done everything to make sure exhibitors get their time and money’s worth. The theater and private rooms have been strategically placed in the back, ensuring that representatives from businesses, transit agencies, governments and fleet operators get a good look at the solutions on display as they meander about the space.
“People need to get back there to have their meeting, so people will be interacting,” he said.
It’s a lesson in event organization that some conferences have learned the hard way. It also ties back to why MOVE, a Terrapinn event, got started in the first place.
Around 2017, Martin and his colleagues realized that companies and governments weren’t talking to each other as much as they could be.
“We didn’t see one [event] that brought it all together,” he said. “So that’s sort of where we sit.”
This year, the intersection of business and public policy is more important than ever. The threat of high tariffs looms over various sectors, and the manufacturing and transportation industries are expected to be some of the most vulnerable to rising costs.
“The tariffs are obviously huge,” Martin said. “I think through the year, there have been so many changes in expectations, which is quite destabilizing.”
The Trump administration is also phasing out tax credits that incentivize electric vehicle purchases, throwing another wrench into the automotive industry that will certainly be discussed at MOVE America.
As has been the case at every major conference this year, artificial intelligence will take center stage as solutions become increasingly specialized.
“With AI, it’s how it feeds into a lot of things. It feeds into autonomous vehicles, fleet maintenance. It’s really about tracking the different applications that different systems are using,” Martin said.
To Martin, the AI moment is but one offshoot of the overall mobility revolution, a renewed interest in transportation that was spurred by innovation in microprocessor and battery technology. Those improvements led to the rise of electric vehicles, which have so far been met with favorable policies and investment from China and the US.
Speaking at this year’s conference will be Tim Draper, an early investor in Tesla, SpaceX, Hotmail, Skype, and, most controversially, Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos.
Draper will talk about investing in mobility innovation, or as Martin puts it, “trying to forecast which ideas have legs and which don’t.”
Other speakers include executives from Amtrak, DHL Supply Chain, Lyft, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, Ford and Honda.
Sponsors for Move America 2025 include Honigman LLP, a law firm that specializes in regulatory compliance and IP protection for startups and corporations in the mobility industry, as well as General Motors, Deloitte, Arup, Verizon, Nokia and J.P. Morgan.
This is the first MOVE America conference to be held in Detroit, after five years in Austin. Apart from being the automotive capital of the US—home to GM, Ford and Stellantis—Detroit also offers a shift in perspective as the city seeks to rebound from financial mismanagement, which led to a 2013 bankruptcy filing and rising crime rates that have since dropped to a nearly six-decade low.
In a press release announcing the move, Visit Detroit CEO Claude Molinari said: “Detroit is home to the world’s No. 1 emerging startup ecosystem, North America’s first EV charging road, an unmatched culinary scene and the birthplace of five genres of music. There has never been a more exciting time to welcome MOVE to the Motor City.”
MOVE America 2025 will take place from September 24-25 at Huntington Place in Detroit, Michigan. Tickets start at $1,995, with free passes for OEMs, fleet agencies, government buyers and members of the press.
