Joseph Cohen
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First of Kind · Joseph Cohen: Infinite Ride
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What Hole Did Apple Leave in the Physical World?
Joseph Cohen says Infinite Machine hopes to fill part of the hole Apple left in how technology looks and feels in the physical world. Apple was a landmark that set the tone for technology in the physical world and inspired a generation of designers and entrepreneurs. No company right now is making hardware that pushes and sets the tone for what technology can look and feel like in the physical world.
Infinite Machine is a tiny company and has done very little so far, with everything still to do. The team is building vehicles and will be building vehicles for the foreseeable future. Vehicles are not the limit. The name Infinite Machine reflects an ambition to build lots of stuff. Competencie
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What Is the Fuck Cars Movement?
Joseph Cohen describes the fuck cars movement as a massive Reddit community with hundreds of thousands of people. The idea is that in cities, humans become second-class citizens to cars, and people take the arrangement for granted. On an average city street the architecture is cars: vehicles parked on both sides of the road and one lane of moving traffic. Movement is dictated by cars. A person waits at the corner for cars, then crosses, subservient to the car.
A couple of years ago someone graffitied a billboard on the BQE in New York that said ban cars, reforest the roads. He uses less aggressive language, and he is really excited about reforesting the roads, bringing nature into cities, a
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What Does Infinite Machine Mean by Non-car?
Joseph Cohen says Infinite Machine uses non-car because there are not great words yet for the emerging category of vehicle. Micromobility, light electric vehicles, and personal electric vehicles are fine, but he finds they are not grabbing enough and do not convey the level of ambition Infinite Machine has.
The car was an incredible tool that defined the 20th century and defined America in many ways, but an increasingly urbanized world needs new tools. The non-car names a much wider envelope. It does not mean only bikes or only scooters. It could have three wheels, it could have four wheels, or it could have no wheels at some point. The name is a problem statement.
He heard the artist Chuc
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Why Did Joseph Cohen Start Infinite Machine?
Joseph Cohen started Infinite Machine after his Vespa was stolen in early 2020. The electric vehicles on the market then were uninspiring, mostly plastic machines he describes as moving printers.
He and his co-founders had always wanted to build a vehicle. The work became a COVID nights and weekends project and ran that way for about three and a half years until the P1 prototype. The personal electric vehicle category is a $200 billion a year global market and will be a $500 billion a year market within a decade, with no Apple of the category and no Tesla of the category. The supply chain had matured enough that they could design the vehicle instead of inventing battery chemistry. They went
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What Vehicles Does Infinite Machine Make?
Joseph Cohen says Infinite Machine makes two vehicles right now: the P1, a super high-end electric seated scooter he calls a roadster, and the Alto, a bike-lane version built from the same platform. The P1 goes 65 miles an hour, carries a license plate, is fully street legal, and includes car play plus cameras on the front and the back. It is stable and smooth, and the ride feels like gliding through earth. Deliveries have started, the P1 is fully in production, and it costs 10,000 dollars.
The core of the platform then drops into the Alto, a 20 mile per hour vehicle that is legal in the bike lane. Alto takes a lot of the technology, thinking, and supply chain from the P1 and sells for 3,50
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What Is Infinite Machine?
Joseph Cohen says Infinite Machine exists to make the best non-car vehicles in the world and rethink how people get around cities. He thinks something like 70% of the world will be living in cities within the next few years. A long shift from internal combustion engines toward electric energy is reshaping how people move.
Trips in cities stay much shorter. People travel three, four, or six miles to get to work and not 60 miles, and they are not getting on the freeway. Electric vehicle adoption has grown tremendously. Adoption is in a bit of a speed bump, but it is continuing unabated. Add dense cities and electric energy together and the vehicle that makes sense in urban environments is inc