Lot's of talk about ‘mobility’ at the recent Geneva motor show. Well, around the car business in general, really.
I think this is the automotive equivalent of human resources or calling someone a waste collection operative: it sounds more poncy than personnel or binman/woman/person, and eventually it slips into conventional usage. I’m not even surprised any more.
Mobility – and more pertinent at the moment – shared mobility is the new, oh, I dunno, whatever the last big buzzword was. Green, perhaps? There are so many clichés that follow the car industry around that it would rather didn’t: gas guzzler, Chelsea tractor, dirty diesel. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it wants to shuffle away from them.
Mobility, as I understand it, means transport, and the trouble with transport is that you know how it is when you see those pie charts telling you how much pollution comes from a particular source: transport is always there, not mobility, putting in its 20% or whatever.
Meanwhile, mobility sits smugly on the sidelines watching transport take the rap for what is, basically, the same thing. And when the morning news shows pictures of pollution, it’s always car tailpipes and transport. Not Islington wood burners and certainly not mobility, guv’nor. You know mobility, the irritating little spiv: mobility is as clean as you like. You could blind yourself on its halo. Mobility ferries old people around or helps youngsters out of poverty.
But, let’s face it, it’s just the same thing in a pinstriped suit. And never more so than when it comes to shared mobility. What’s shared mobility?
The car industry – sorry, mobility companies – have lots of shared mobility plans, and you’ll be shown them, on video, in their most utopian state: imagine a CGI city scape, with big plants on every empty street corner, white fluffy clouds in an otherwise blue sky, and the perfect modern nuclear family bouncing out of their apartment to get into an item of shared mobility. It’ll have four wheels, quite a few seats, and seamlessly and silently it whisks them to their respective destinations – the school, the gym, the office. They’re smiling. They’re relaxed. Of course, they are. They’re shared mobility users! And you can see the appeal for – what to call them – operators? Mobilisers? Oh, I don’t even care.
But anyway, Volvo last year signed a deal to develop a fleet of autonomous Volvo XC90s for Uber. And even though they might cost a quarter of a million quid each or more, once decked out with the right technology, consider the savings: the cost of keeping two drivers employed driving one car might come to £100,000 a year. Do away with the drivers and, hey presto, free money.
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Bus is not the only form of shared mobilty
Scrap makes a good point. Another point I wanted to make is shared mobilty can also be shared vehicles, but not at the same time. Much like a taxi, but with very different economics when there is no driver. With lower cost comes more users, and that means more options, such cheaper single-person vehicles for the many journeys done alone, but room for bigger vehicles for the family or friends trip.
'Mobility' ought to be about ging from A to B...
as efficiently as possible, in terms of time, costs and pollution. Car makers experience the pressure from tech funds that market themselves as mobility providers, while the first mentioned are 'merely' selling automotive hardware, cars. With the number of cars on the road still increasing, cars themselves growing wider by the model and the industry ignoring the effects on traffic and our living environment, obviously car makers are not entitled to label themselves as 'mobility' providers.
I think it’s a valid
I think it’s a valid distinction. Transport is the feature, mobility is the benefit. In our cities in particular, we have seen that cars have significant downsides as well as upsides. So mobility is about how people move around (including walking) and transport forms part of the answer.