Living in the Creative Zone: André Bogsjoe on Uniti’s Electric Vehicle

Living in the Creative Zone: André Bogsjoe on Uniti’s Electric Vehicle

Living in the Creative ZoneTransforming the World One Idea at a Time is a collection of interviews with international figures driving change forward through various purpose and passion projects. For the next year these interviews will publish on the impactmania platform, the complete e-book is available in 2018.

Writer Jody Turner interviews Swedish social change maker André Bogsjoe whom she met while speaking at Lars Lings’ Nordic Future Days in Sundsvall, Sweden. André Bogsjoe talks about his current project UNITI, an eco focused car, a product that can be delivered directly to your door.


BY JODY TURNER

Hello André, It is a pleasure to meet you at Nordic Future Days. In your Future Days presentation you discussed the origin of your latest sustainable project, a transportation vehicle named UNITI. Do tell us more about Uniti!

A famous astronaut once looked back at earth and experienced a sense of unity, a feeling that all of us are connected. This is a unity that connects us as humans with nature.

”When I first looked back at the Earth, standing on the Moon, I cried.”
– Alan Shepard, Apollo 14 mission, February 1971.

Uniti the product, is a futuristic open source electric vehicle (EV) that focuses on a holistic vision for the world. We are headquartered in Lund, Sweden but the team is spread around the world. We are truly global in our thinking and doing. We have made this sustainable product yet it is a beautiful, easy-to-use technology, that stands as a premium in the small vehicle category.

I truly love it. As I listen to you speak, I realize you and Team Uniti have shifted the paradigm holistically in the way we create, how we market, how we use the product. Can you talk about that a little?

When we began the design of Uniti, we viewed it as a consumer product for people to buy online with a delivery to home versus a car lot purchase and all that entails. This is our model and yet currently we have a store interested in carrying our product. This is new.

Our very first product in the development of Uniti was not a car but rather was the Kepler Pod, a VR experience immersing the driver into an experience of the Uniti vehicle. This helped us with the user experience product development, it helped us to create and develop the product quickly.

KeplerPod

Kepler Pod

The Kepler Pod also began our marketing journey.

Marketing has been built in to the company from the beginning. We have recorded everything that has occurred along the way, and by sharing the process it has created demand.

We also use our VR equipment to show how it might be sold in a consumer store, it includes colors, design options, etc.

The crowd funding video raised 12 million Swedish Krona [more than $1,3 million] in two days. The video we used captured our journey from the beginning small space with sticky tape ideations on the wall, to the 1,000 m2 space with a dynamic team and wonderful machines filling up the space.

The Uniti Team has designed not only a paradigm shifting product but a full system shift in how we create, market and do business, yes?

Yes, we have built something that is sustainable for the world but also has a sustainable business model. Uniti is that for us and is also that for the world.

We have a new office in Lund, new equipment, and an ever expanding team. When you build from the bottom up it attracts great people working to do something really new.

We recently partnered with Siemens and Kuka Robotics and are looking at a production of 50,000 vehicles for the European market (our own back yard) and for Asia where they need it most.

What will Uniti sell for?

The selling point is currently 20,000 Euro. You can sign up in advance for Uniti on our site, you can preorder by end of the summer and have it delivered to your doorstep by the end of next year.

What has been a great learning from this for you and what does the future look like for Uniti?

We started with the question, “How can we change the world?” Everyday our team faces several challenges, but because we work similarly to how a community works, the collective knowing helps us move through challenges quickly.

We are looking at how to share the final product. We are considering, perhaps in a subscription form or via sharing stations, so more people can access it. The future will tell us the next steps!

Thank you Andre! Love this!

André Bogsjoe

André Bogsjoe

André Bogsjoe has a long history of working for societal change as an expert in social innovation. He is the co-founder of the Social Innovation Center at Lund University and has been successful in raising governmental funding for a range of projects, all with a purpose of solving problems in the world. At Uniti he focuses on fund raising initiatives, and shared the journey at Nordic Future days, Sundsvall Sweden 2017.