Mobility is a key enabler of our economic and social lives. The movement of goods and people is essential for economic success—but it also has a significant impact on our planet. If we are to maintain current levels of movement around the globe into the future, we must find a smarter and more sustainable way of managing it if we are also to meet global emissions targets.
The creation of a smarter, more sustainable transport system is among the most ambitious challenges tied to the European Green Deal. However, if we can manage it effectively, it should significantly improve the quality of life for many people. We should be able to build more efficient and integrated mobility systems, and also improve environmental quality, contributing to better health. If we consider culture as—in the words of American anthropologist, Lesly White—"the set of means that contribute to making our lives longer and safer”, we can see that moving towards a smarter mobility system is an important step in developing European culture. What, though, are the concrete objectives and tools of this transition?
The European Strategy for Sustainable and Smart Mobility
The European Union’s document "Strategy for Sustainable and Smart Mobility" outlines ten flagship initiatives, including promoting the adoption of zero-emission vehicles and enhancing transport safety. It is, however, easy to set out goals. The real question is how to achieve them, and particularly within reasonable timeframes and costs.
The strategy highlights three key tools:
- Incentives or subsidies, funded through public investments or public–private partnerships.
- Incorporating costs into product prices, for example, by applying carbon taxes or cap-and-trade systems like the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS).
- Research and innovation to develop new technologies, enable the exploitation of new resources or improve the efficiency of existing ones.
Many of these are at governmental level, but individual and corporate choices also play a key role. These can be encouraged by governments using ‘nudging’ policies. However, there are still key challenges to overcome.
Addressing challenges
One of the key challenges in establishing a smarter transport system is the low energy density and intermittency of renewable sources, which hinder their application in transport. The success of transition depends on our ability to use renewable resources more efficiently—and that means both generation and storage technologies must change.
In the last two years, venture capital funds have invested over $70 billion in developing renewable energy generation and storage technologies. The International Energy Agency’s database now lists 85 renewable technologies under development for transportation. This sounds very positive, but only five are considered mature, and all are related to road transportation. The other 80, covering rail, aviation, and shipping, are still at the “early adoption” stage.
One way in which the process of transition can be accelerated is by a process called technological diversification. This means using a broader portfolio of technologies in designing products and services. It seems likely that cloud computing, the IoT and artificial intelligence (AI) will all be important here.
Building on technology
One example of this technological diversification is in next-generation battery management systems. New cloud-based systems for data collection and analysis are enabling much more accurate prediction of individual cell behaviour, speeding up the move beyond existing lithium battery technology.
There have been some real-world success stories already. For example, we have worked with the city of Istanbul to develop a ‘technical assistant pilot’ to help predict mobility demand and traffic flows. This can be used by both policy-makers and citizens. Policy-makers can draw on it to redesign public transport to meet demand, and citizens can use it to get real-time suggestions for the fastest form of transport, depending on congestion.
We have also worked with vehicle manufacturers Volvo Trucks and Iveco to enable predictive maintenance for trucks. A similar project with military aircraft manufacturer Lockheed Martin has enabled remote diagnostics for aircraft. This project uses over 600 sensors per aircraft, and more than 150 analytical models.
Finding the way forward
One of the biggest challenges to building a smarter transport system is that adopting new technologies outside a company’s core expertise can increase complexity. Data-driven insights are key to transformation, but many companies struggle to generate tangible value from their data. The success of the transition to sustainable mobility depends on investment, but also on how productively investments are used. Achieving productivity gains will be essential to realising the ambitious goals of the European Green Deal.
