The contribution of vehicle concepts to future urban mobility

As early as 2008, a consortium of European OEMs, suppliers and research organisations has started planning for a project that investigates the changes going along with the new propulsion technology from the vehicle side. The approach further included a detailed analysis of the customer requirements as well as an assessment against key criteria such as energy efficiency, ergonomics and safety of the concept vehicles to be developed. After successful application, the project ELVA Advanced Electric Vehicle Architectures started in December 2010 as part of the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme. The key objective of the project is to develop dedicated vehicle concepts for urban areas (including commuting) that aim for series adoption in 2020. The concept development is based on a comprehensive forecast of technology options and customer requirements, the latter also looking at scenarios for future mobility. Parts of the analysis were studies and OEM-internal information, but also a large-scale public customer survey. The results clearly show that customers expect future cars to mainly provide the same usability and versatility as today's cars, while being much more energy efficient. In order to bring together these requirements with the technology options that can be expected from 2020 and beyond, some of the customer wishes had to be limited. In particular, this concerns the driving range of the vehicle that mainly depends on the size of the battery. Clearly, there is a limit for the battery, both related to cost and weight. The resulting range however is still in line with distances that are actually driven by the intended users. (A)