When Jessica Robinson moved to Detroit from San Francisco five years ago, she sold her car.

“When I moved here it was a huge quality of life choice. I walk to work, I bicycle, I have a Vespa that I ride around. I was able to buy my first home here, which I never would have been able to do in the Bay Area,” she says.

Robinson’s organisation, the Detroit Mobility Lab, aims to tempt tech talent towards Michigan. Its office is in a downtown WeWork, a trendy office with the Silicon Valley company’s trademark glass booths and shared working spaces. Here, taxi app giant Lyft has an outpost, as does Bosch, as well as many smaller startups.

The Motor City is changing. Once synonymous with decline, poverty and crime, it is now home to hipster hotels, a buzzy restaurant scene and a slew of startups working on self-driving cars, air taxis and the tech that powers them. Electric scooters dot the pavements and it has a shared bicycle scheme, shiny new buses and a freshly-launched transit mobile app.

Self-driving vehicles from at least three companies, Waymo, Ford, and May Mobility, trundle through the streets. And startups are coming from all over the world, including the UK, in the hope of partnering with the big American car companies that are headquartered here and creating a workforce with the engineering and manufacturing expertise they need.