Riyadh steps into the spotlight this week as CoMotion GLOBAL 2025 opens its three-day program, and the city feels almost purpose-built for an event like this. Streets lined with next-generation transport pilots, sweeping giga-projects rising at bewildering speed, and a government leaning hard into mobility transformation — the setting does half the storytelling on its own. The gathering brings together innovators from across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East to examine, quite bluntly, where the global mobility shift is actually happening and who is moving fast enough to shape it.
What unfolds across the summit is a dense mix of electrification, autonomy, AI-powered transport coordination, and new models built for both wealthy megacities and fast-growing developing markets. It’s a rare space where high-performance EV manufacturers sit alongside shared-mobility pioneers, and both seem equally at home. Riyadh uses the moment to underline its own trajectory: not merely adopting mobility tech, but deploying it at a citywide scale that very few places can match.
The event carries the weight of major institutional backing — hosted by SCEGA and supported by RCRC, Riyadh Municipality, MoTLS, MoMH, MCIT, DGA, and the TGA — and that broad coalition shapes the tone. Instead of siloed experiments, the Kingdom is pushing coordinated, interoperable systems. Keynotes from figures like H.E. Fahd bin Abdulmohsan Al Rasheed and H.E. Dr. Rumaih Al Rumaih set that frame, while private-sector leaders such as Mate Rimac, Bill Russo, James Yu, Chris Li, Jinjun Tian, Valerie Labi, and Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr add texture from the front lines of industry and city governance.
Around the venue, mobility partners like Uber, door2door, Budget Saudi Arabia, and Changan Almajdouie demonstrate EV fleets and intelligent transport services in real time, turning the city into a rolling demo. Even the climate footprint of the summit is accounted for through The Bridge Initiative, which offsets emissions via a large-scale methane-capture project in Bogotá — a reminder that mobility transformation and climate responsibility are intertwined rather than parallel paths.
A packed agenda stretches across two stages, dedicated Mobility Labs, the launch of a new Mayors in Motion network, and the first CoMotion Urban Visionary Distinction. Riyadh’s 176-kilometer metro megaproject, its emerging role as an early deployment market for autonomous technologies, and the momentum behind Saudi EV manufacturing anchor the local story. Global spotlights widen the lens: Africa’s shared-mobility rise, Latin America’s progress in electrification, China’s hyper-scaled mobility playbook, North America and Europe’s advances in AI-driven logistics, and the Middle East’s push toward Sentient Cities.
Guests drift between sessions with the sense that city-level action is what will define the next decade — and Riyadh, bold and unapologetically ambitious, positions itself as the stage where those decisions cohere into something tangible. The conversations feel charged, sometimes impatient, and grounded in the idea that the future of mobility won’t be theorized in distant boardrooms but proven on the streets of cities willing to move first.