Automotive

Global automotive leaders can actively shape the reinvention of personal transport. Autonomous driving, alternative powertrains and other technologies are drastically altering the automobile and mobility system.

This community is a high-level group of peers dedicated to ensuring the long-term sustainability of their industry and society.

Industry agenda

The Automotive Industry Governors define the industry agenda. The group, comprising chief executives and chairs from partner organizations, closely align the agenda with related System Initiatives.

The Governors identified four priorities for 2018: autonomous vehicles, CO₂ emissions and pollution, intra-city mobility and the future of production. The Forum is addressing these challenges through a number of projects and activities:

1. Autonomous and urban mobility

• The Autonomous and Urban Mobility project aims to bring together government and business leaders to accelerate the implementation of autonomous and shared vehicle fleets to address urban mobility challenges, identify gaps in current governance structures and pilot new policy frameworks and protocols. It will achieve this by developing a partnership with an additional city (or cities) and leveraging learnings from the Boston autonomous vehicle pilot


• Launching the New Mobility Coalition, a group of business and NGO leaders who will develop a shared vision and policy recommendations for new mobility (emphasizing transitions to autonomous, electric and shared vehicle fleets)


• Scoping new workstreams and identifying key governance gaps related to autonomous vehicles Possible focus areas include:
  
  
  • Electrification of autonomous fleets
  
  
  • Insurance and liability for autonomous vehicles
  
  
  • Data governance and interoperable infrastructure
  
  
  • Workforce impacts of autonomous driving
  
  
  • Shaping urban mobility choices
  
  
  
  

The project is now based at the Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in San Francisco, though still part of the System Initiative on Shaping the Future of Mobility.

2. CO₂ emissions and pollution

Vehicle emissions and their impact on climate change and pollution will shape future transport. 

The Global Battery Alliance forms part of the System Initiative on Shaping the Future of Economic Progress. It aims to achieve the inclusive, innovative and sustainable battery supply chain needed to power the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It will achieve this by forming a public-private coalition that will scale and accelerate existing efforts to achieve sustainable batteries, and develop policy recommendations.

The Future of Electricity project aims to hasten the decentralization, digitalization and electrification of new energy uses such as mobility in order to meet growing energy demand and to contribute to carbon reduction goals. The project work of 2016-2017 developed a multi-stakeholder model and frameworks to accelerate these trends, both at a municipal and national level. The recommendations encompass policy, infrastructure and business models and are outlined in The Future of Electricity: New Technologies Transforming the Grid Edge and in Electric Vehicles for Smarter Cities. In 2017, with the Forum’s support, Colombia’s Ministry of Mines and Energy launched an initiative to implement the national-level framework. The next phase of the project will aim to scale these frameworks in new markets at both the municipal and national level.

3. Intra-city mobility

As economic activity concentrates in urban centres and erodes in rural communities, inequality and exclusion affect hundreds of millions of people around the world, leaving many unable to use the same mobility solutions.

• The SIMSystem: Designing Seamless Integrated Mobility project aims to enable faster, safer, cleaner and more affordable mobility for people and goods by integrating disparate transportation modes such as bike share, autonomous pods, ocean shipping and air travel into a seamlessly integrated mobility system (SIMSystem). It will achieve this by endorsing and publicizing the SIMSystem Manifesto, which outlines the guiding principles to achieve a SIMSystem, among key business and government stakeholders 


• Collaborating with a government or group of governments to apply the manifesto principles to a specific mobility application and/or geography


• Developing evaluation metrics to track a SIMSystem’s desired mobility performance (e.g. passenger-kilometre within a specific district, estimated CO₂ emissions, hours lost in congestion)

4. Production

The automotive industry must understand and anticipate growth and disruptions from new technologies that will transform the production ecosystem.

The System Initiative on Shaping the Future of Production aims to shape the application of transformative technologies so they build innovative and sustainable production systems that benefit everyone.