Today we would like to present you the lecture of prominent professor Sergio Matteo Savaresi from Polytechnic University of Milan as a part of our Distinguished lectures program. Watch the video of the distinguished EAI lecture below to discover more about emerging trends, common growing misperceptions and forecasts in the field of personal mobility.
Will future technologies reduce the number of cars?
According to professor Savaresi, there are several unstoppable megatrends that are going to affect future mobility, such as demographic growth, urbanisation of population, ageing, and greenhouse effect.
Modern megatrends in personal mobility are showing that mobility models have to transform big and heavy vehicles into small and light, fossil fuels into electric energy, personal ownership into shared service, human-driven cars into autonomous. Remarkably, the automation of a driver will boost the service-ization of the mobility (sharing). Thus, an autonomous car and car sharing will catalyse the electric car adoption. These new types of mobility models will be realised in approximately 20-30 years.
Besides, 10% of the today cars can almost perfectly fulfil the need of the population without any change of behaviour, just by “sharing”. A 1:10 increase of an average mileage of a car creates a major opportunity for upgrading car technology(less cars, more technologically equipped), at constant market revenues.
According to the estimations, demonstrated in this lecture, fast introduction of autonomous cars can save 400000 lives in US in the next 50 years. Therefore, they will be almost perfectly safe comparing to human drivers in nearly 20 years.
Sergio Matteo Savaresi is a professor of Polytechnic University of Milan (Politecnico di Milano) – the leading university in the area of technologies and engineering in Italy. He is the founder and the chair of the large research group focused on Systems&Control research in vehicles. Mobility and vehicles are his major research topics.
