Mobility of the future
Safe and mobile – how will our children get from A to B in the future?
Satisfying individual needs while also looking at the overall picture – the mobile solutions of the future must know the needs of each individual, while also being safe, clean, efficient and above all else, sustainable.
It's early in the morning, just gone 8 am, and everyone is ready to head off: Dad has his first team meeting at 9, on his way to work he drops Sarah off in the day-care centre. Ten-year-old Jonas is already trudging his way to school with the neighbors' children, and Mum is now dashing in the family's second car to her practice, her first patients are already waiting for her. In the afternoon then, the young ones have to be collected, Jonas has to head off to football training in a nearby town, thankfully the supermarket is on the route.
Job, looking after the kids, organizing the household – families are constantly on the move today, and most of the time in the car, particularly if they do not live right in the heart of a large town. If both parents are working, there is normally a second car in the garage beside the family car so that all the daily chores can be completed. In addition, the route to work has grown longer on average in recent years. In 1996, more than half of all employees in Germany lived less than ten kilometers away from work, according to the German Federal Statistical Office. In 2008, this figure had fallen to just 45% of all workers. Professional mobility, which has long been expected of everyone and is part and parcel of the globalized economic order, brings with it more frequent changes of job and place of residence, either for the whole family or just for the breadwinner. This then means commuting at the weekend, often from one end of the country to the other. And because it has been such a long time since the grandparents lived with us under the same roof and they are now living hundreds of kilometers away, and because we don't want to lose contact with our childhood friends, we end up spending hours on end in cars, trains or airplanes.
Man is mobile – and mobile he must remain
Mobility, derived from the Latin mobilitas, is a basic need of humans, and also the engine behind social change. Even our senses have always had to learn new things, for instance when new transport technologies such as railways or the car made inroads into our life and speeded things up. Economic conditions, technological possibilities, new lifestyles - all these factors influence the way we move around. Individual and flexible, that is how we want to - and must - get from A to B today. In addition, we are becoming more aware that we cannot live at the expense of our children or grandchildren, and we need to go easy on those things which need protection: our health, the environment and resources.
Which is why numerous experts are currently looking for answers to the pressing question: How can we achieve mobility which is sustainable, features low (or no) emissions and also meets the requirements of a modern, globalized society as well as the various different needs of individuals? And which allows us to become less dependent on the declining supplies of raw materials? Paying equal attention to technology and society is the job of interdisciplinary expert teams in which engineers and social scientists, physicists and philosophers together create scenarios as to what the mobile world of tomorrow could look like. Daimler’s Society and Technology Research Group - a future-looking department in which more than 60 scientists, PhD candidates and students are working - also requires lateral thinking when it comes to developing new mobility concepts and technologies.
There is no ideal way
The solutions can only be tailored, customized to the various different requirements of a pluralistic society - all the experts agree on this. And the approaches must be varied and diverse because not all new, potentially successful technologies can be used straight away throughout the entire country and in every type of vehicle. In the coming years however, according to the experts, battery-operated electric vehicles could be the best vehicles for a large share of everyday mobility requirements. With a current range of around 200 kilometers per tankful – and this can be expanded further in the future – they are ideal for going to the supermarket, school or work. For medium ranges, ultra-modern hybrid vehicles, which combine the power of
combustion engines and electric drives in an optimum manner
depending on the driving situation, represent a solution. For long
routes, ultra-new high-tech combustion engines with or without a
hybrid module can already reduce fuel consumption considerably
even now. And what was a mere dream of the future just a few years
ago, has today become reality: electric cars with fuel cells – these
generate traction current directly on board with the help of hydrogen
– are suitable for all distances, and thus allow emission-free driving
on the freeway and in the city alike.
Organizing sustainable commercial transport
In order to make mobility more sustainable, not only must new concepts for transporting individuals be found, goods transport as well as public transport must be subjected to a sustainability check. Because on German roads alone, more than three billion tonnes of cargo were transported last year, despite the recession, according to the German Federal Statistical Office. In the future, more intelligent logistics could help to lower the traffic load according to experts such as Ulrich Wagner from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) (:[see interview]). Even now, fuel consumption and the emission behavior of trucks and commercial vehicles can be reduced considerably, without sacrificing anything in terms of power. This is all thanks to new diesel technologies which cut consumption and CO2 emissions per tonne of net load by almost half, as well as particles and nitrogen oxide by as much as 98%. An alternative fuel to diesel is natural gas, for example. This can already be found in fleets of buses and waste disposal vehicles in numerous large cities across the globe. New fuels as well, on their own or in combination with traditional fuels such as gasoline or diesel, are helping to further reduce emissions of harmful substances in all vehicle sectors. Even fuel cell technology can be used in local public transport - the second generation of emission-free buses took to the road in 2010.
Working on a new infrastructure
New drive technologies on their own are not yet the solution when it comes to creating sustainable transport systems in the short, medium and, most important of all, the long term. The infrastructure must be further expanded if more and more people across the globe want to travel in an environmentally friendly manner in the future. Because the drivers of electric cars currently have to spend a long time looking before they find a suitable charging station where they can "fill up" their vehicles. Daimler is therefore working with other companies such as the electricity company RWE in order to expand the network of electricity charging stations in the German capital. This is being done as part of the model project "e-mobility Berlin", which started in 2008. A fleet of over a hundred electric cars will soon be making their way along the river Spree in Berlin. This year will see the launch of this concept in the Italian cities of Rome, Milan and Pisa, followed by further field trials in Europe and the USA. Similar cross-company initiatives, which are also designed to expand the infrastructure of the hydrogen supply for electric cars with fuel cells, have already been started.
The international trend is pointing to the metropolises
In many parts of the world, cities are experiencing a heavy influx of new residents. If two thirds of the global population lived on the land 60 years ago, in the year 2030 close to 70% of the earth's inhabitants will be living in towns and cities, according to forecasts by the United Nations. These urban agglomerations with their high volume of traffic will therefore require new mobility concepts, concepts which are both flexible and environmentally friendly at the same time. This means better networking of individual and public transport for instance, or even carsharing with emission-free cars.
For example, the Daimler initiative "car2go", which started off as a model test in Ulm in 2008 and has now been launched in Austin, Texas, allows registered users to borrow electric cars which are provided in the downtown area of cities, and to return them to a marked parking lot when they are finished with them. The user is charged on a minute-by-minute basis; the price of 19 cents a minute covers all the costs, including gasoline or diesel and insurance.
A different model is testing new transport systems for buses. Separate driving lanes with their own traffic lights are designed to make local public transport more attractive. The system is already in use in metropolises such as Istanbul and the Colombian capital of Bogota. This international farsightedness is unavoidable, because while the population figures in many industrial nations are declining and the degree of motorization in these societies can scarcely be increased, emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil are now catching up with mass mobilization. Sustainable concepts and technologies are therefore in demand across the world in order to solve global problems such as climate change, scarcity of resources and environmental pollution. If quality of life, mobility requirements and sustainability are successfully combined with each other in the future, our children will have the chance to be as mobile as they
want.
