The 6th research forum on mobility took place on May 8 in Duisburg, Germany. With a good mix of presentations from academia and industry, a wide array of topics was covered. Electric mobility was regarded with much more enthusiasm as many speakers saw battery prices coming down faster than anticipated by most think tanks.
Futurist Lars Thomsen discussed many tipping points for the auto industry; he expects autonomous cars to perform better than the average driver by 2017 and also noted that fleets of autonomous pods will become the dominant medium for transport in mega cities, where most people will no longer own a car. At the same time he did not connect the dots and consider the impact on the demand side and the implications for OEMs.
This fit well with the topic of my presentation which focused on fleets of self-driving taxis. I presented detailed cost calculations for a fleet of urban autonomous vehicles. The data shows that driverless mobility services could halve the costs per person-kilometer compared to car-ownership. One of the key sources of savings is professional life-cycle management for all vehicle components which will greatly increase the economic life of the cars and thereby decrease the capital cost per kilometer traveled.