Meet Michael Mangion, Founder and CEO at EV Rental Company: Trilvee

Trilvee is developing a platform to enable customers to move from A to B cleaner, faster, and cheaper. This will be achieved by allowing customers to hail on demand, the right vehicle for each trip which is then delivered to them ‘driverless’ using teleoperation.

For most urban trips, the right vehicle is a 1/2 seat light EV that can get through traffic and uses much less energy than a regular car, but when a customer does need a full-size car or even van then that is what is delivered. In this way we can maximise the versatility of the service while optimising for speed, efficiency, and comfort.

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

I was living in Dundee in the late noughties and my wife had to commute back and forth to Edinburgh alone daily in a family car, a tremendous waste. My own trip into Dundee centre was equally wasteful of energy and also space to park (and time to find a parking place).

Obviously electrification could transplant the emissions out of cities and at least make a renewable energy source possible, but when I read David MacKay’s “Sustainable Energy without the hot air” I realised that reducing the amount of energy used per passenger kilometre was the key as that is where the germ of the idea for right-sized vehicles was first planted. Over the years I developed this into a bigger vision around ‘multimodal’ mobility, and Trilvee is the first step in this by focusing on building a platform to deliver right-sized vehicles in urban settings on demand.

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

Trilvee is quite young as a company, but the vision has evolved quite dramatically over more than a decade since the first insight until the tech maturity, social behaviours, and climate urgency aligned to make the timing right to go to market. The outcome of this is that what Trilvee is doing now is just the first step in a much bigger vision for how to radically change and improve the way we interact with mobility and the impact it has on our cities and planet.

Our rapid prototyping has meant that in just four months we’ve been able to run controlled demonstrations of our technology with a working prototype vehicle, prior to a full market launch. We’re still in early-stages of developing the business but excited about giving stakeholders a glimpse of what will be possible in 2023 and beyond.

What can we hope to see from Trilvee in the future?

Trilvee’s first focus is to reinvent the way we move around towns by providing a better alternative to using cars for most trips – essentially giving people a carrot (rather than a stick) – to fuel that desire to change.

Once we establish ourselves on shorter, urban trips, we certainly plan to bring that same thinking that challenges the status quo to all trips and believe that we can help people to completely rethink the way they interact with transportation.