Breaking down the Silos – a multi-platform Proposal for crosscutting collaboration in Road Mobility Research
On October 1st, 2018 SME Europe and SME Connect hosted a Working Dinner in Strasbourg on the topic: “Breaking down the Silos – a multi-platform Proposal for crosscutting collaboration in Road Mobility Research”
The importance of this event was increased by the participation of Dr. Paul Rübig MEP, member of the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy, Vice-Chair of STOA, Honorary president of SME Europe of the EPP, Henna Virkkunen MEP, Member of the Committee on Transport and Tourism, Opinion Rapporteur Horizon Europe framework programme for research and innovation 2021-2027, Prof. Dr. Inese Vaidere MEP, Member of the Committee on Budgets, Board Members of SME Europe of the EPP, Lambert Van Nistelrooij MEP, Member of the Committee on Regional Development, Opinion Rapporteur Horizon Europe framework programme for research and innovation 2021-2027, Sven Schulze MEP, Member of the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy, Ismail Ertug MEP, Member of the Committee on Transport and Tourism, Andor Deli MEP, Member of the Committee on Transport and Tourism, Board Member of SME Europe and at least but not last Dr. -Ing Stephan Neugebauer, Ertrac and Evia Chairman, BMW Group Director Global Research Cooperation.
In Europe, we really can perform trust building systems
Dr. Paul Rübig MEP opened the event focusing on the different issues that the next generation will experience, such as the incrementation of the population that until 2050 will increase to 10billion people, so that, the Road Mobility is going to be a key point for our future. Dr. Paul Rübig was concentrating his speech on sustainable energy and Industry 4.0, two major points for the success of our future world.
In his keynote, Dr. Stephan Neugebauer, was proud and happy to discuss the ideas for focus program for research for the next European framework program. He is starting the discussion with the social challenges.
Which are the key challenges for the next years for mobility?
He targeted two major topics such as the decarbonization and the digitalization. With decarbonization, he emphasized the climate change issues and air quality. With the digitalization, we have the opportunity to improve the traffic fluidity and the services. Mr. Neugebauer expressed his ideas about the growth of Electromobility stressing that
If we have talked 10 years ago about Electro mobility it was just something outstanding, but today we can buy it everywhere, so what happened in this small period of 10 years, was a success story!
Dr. Neugebauer asked if for the next decade it is going to be enough to keep the focus only on mobile efficiency? Apparently, we would have to focus on the general efficiency. The European industry leads the automobile sector, but we are not today the world leading market in electromobility. Europe has to continue with its efficiency programme, urging for traffic fluidity, traffic management, parking management, as well as the interaction between the vehicles and infrastructure as well as automated and connected driving.
There are also some digital areas like new mobility services, share mobility or other digital innovation. In his closing, he remarks the fact that, we need infrastructure on the digital side and the communication sector, we need the DATA industry, new stakeholders are demanded, but the automotive sector is in the responsibility to manage the complexity of the system. Does it make sense to have delegated programme for road transport? When you look at the technology in detail for automatic driving it is quite a different case comparing to driving a train. The key messages here are, the green vehicles initiative was it successful? Todays’ technology is not good enough to keep the world clean, we have to continue to care about the whole transport system in order to decarbonize the road, to improve the air quality, to avoid congestion, in order to improve the city mobility for the people.