London, UK – 12 May 2015 – Frost & Sullivan
While transport authorities reiterate their goals of reducing the carbon footprint on the one hand and the need to create a safer commuting world on the other, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and the automotive industry are constantly working on the development of new vehicles for greener and safer commuting. The concept of intelligent mobility aims to bridge the gap between the different industry stakeholders, by defining a roadmap for all which will help to reduce traffic congestion by up to 30 percent, carbon emission by a tenth and optimise travel speed by up to 60 percent.
“The major issue we still face today is traffic congestion. More and more vehicles flood the roads which are built for only a fraction of the vehicles in operation,” outlines Frost & Sullivan Senior Partner and Global Practice Director, Sarwant Singh. “But even though most OEMs having dedicated teams for each major sector, such as vehicle automation, cooperative driving (v2x communication), mobility services or greener commuting, each of these teams works on their own solution to fight the problem, instead of reaping synergies. Intelligent mobility is an approach which tries to integrate these teams to synthesize their individual efforts and to arrive at solutions to reduce traffic congestion that have multifaceted benefits for all stakeholders.”
“So far the industry’s solution to reduce traffic congestion seems to have been the offer of ride-sharing and car-pooling services. However, while car-sharing has gained the reputation that every shared car can remove seven cars from the road, reality shows, that it merely dilutes the need for ownership. At peak time, we still see the same number of cars on the roads, since car-sharing primarily serves several users spread across the day, but not at the same time,” explains Mr. Singh. “Ride-sharing, on the other hand, gives several commuters along the same journey route the opportunity to use one instead of three or four vehicles, which directly combats the issue of traffic congestion.”
A combined approach from all stakeholders could however, result in achieving cross-cutting benefits rather than achieving one goal at the cost of another. “According to our latest research, the combination of efforts could result in a minimum of 15 percent to as much as 33 percent reduction in crash prevention through incident management and another ten percent by enhanced collision avoidance,” concludes Mr. Singh. “Optimizing ride- or car-sharing models can help to reduce global costs by USD 5.6 billion annually, while increasing the average travel speed could result in a 10-15 percent reduction in CO2 emissions. Crowd-sourcing, gamification and social networking will be the means to bring this change also in the driver about.”
