VW's Steiger presents radical vision for mobility

Hearing one of the senior directors at Volkswagen describing future cities with no cars parked on the street was one of the highlights of the European Voice Innovation Forum in Brussels earlier this week. Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Steiger is an engaging and avuncular character with a pretty radical and enticing vision for how sustainable mobility should develop.

Steiger, who is director of future technologies at VW and charman of European technology platform ERTRAC made the key point that we should decouple transport from mobility, and optimise transport infrastructure.

He certainly did not sound the death knell of the private car, but instead imagined constantly connected cars that warned their drivers of congestion and suggested alternative routes, cars which used a combination of renewably produced electricity and oil-alternatives like biogas, and cars that were much more efficient than those we have now. 

Steiger argues that current cars are often not suited to the task they perform. For example a large family estates is often overkill for the school run,  but can feel small on a 700km trip to see the relatives, and that’s because they’re designed as a compromise.

His focus was on city mobility, and there he saw a great move towards that most traditional of transport methods – two feet. In the future he believes we’ll walk a lot more, use electric scooters and electrically-assisted bikes, and adopt a new class of what he called ‘micro-vehicles’, often electric, to complete the last few kilometres of our          Jennifer Jacquemart / © European Voice.                  journey.          

The idea is that we switch, swap and match our transport modes to our mobility needs, much the same argument that we heard from Portuguese Professor Tiago Farias on Comment Visions earlier this year.

Where Steiger went a few steps further, however, is in explaining how urban areas would be transformed by new mobility systems. At the moment if you look at your average city street, whether it’s in the suburbs or downtown, and you’ll see at least one line of cars. These are parked, motionless, and as far as everyone apart from their owner is concerned, they are uselessly cluttering the road.

What Steiger proposes is to create purpose-built compact high-rise carparks where residents would be obliged to leave their vehicles. And there are many benefits to his plan, prinicpally that all that space currently occupied by motionless private vehicles could be used for bus lanes, bike lanes and pedestrian pavements. The car parks could host a new suite of services for the owners, and excess heat from the vehicle engines could be captured and used too.

It was a fascinating presentation, and an interesting insight into how a company like VW may see mobility developing. To hear such a radical, multi-modal vision of sustainable mobility from someone high-up within one of the world’s largest car-makers was also, in my opinion, a pleasant surprise.

The next step is to find a city with the courage, conviction and budget to implement those kinds of plans, because I’m pretty sure that once we’re able to see the ideas in action then most of us will be convinced of the benefits.