The next leap in mobility: Audi searches for solutions for future urban mobility
- The Audi Urban Future Award 2014 begins in four cities
- CEO Rupert Stadler: “Thinking ahead is part of our social responsibility.”
- Science slam contributions online at www.audi-urban-future.com
“The next leap in mobility” – this is the motto of the Audi Urban Future Award 2014. Four teams of experts from four cities will present their ideas for solving the problems of urban mobility. The projects from Seoul, Berlin, Boston and Mexico City take different approaches, but have one thing in common: they aim to improve mobility in large cities and enhance residents’ quality of life. The intelligent automobile plays an important part in this.
For the Audi Urban Future Award 2014, mobility experts and urban planners, natural scientists and ethnographers, IT specialists and product designers in interdisciplinary teams are developing new ideas for future mobility. “The automobile is looking for and finding the city,” says Rupert Stadler, CEO of AUDI AG. “This means not only navigation but a symbiosis that is essential for all of us to live together. To think ahead and search for such a symbiosis is the mission of the Audi Urban Future Initiative – and part of our social responsibility.”
At the science slam in the Audi Forum in Ingolstadt, the four Award teams from Berlin, Boston, Mexico City and Seoul presented the first results of their work live on stage in front of an audience of more than 300.
- “Individuality and collectivity are not mutually exclusive.” This is the thesis of the team from Berlin. After the departure of the airport from Berlin Tegel, the site of Berlin TXL – The Urban Tech Republic will become a research and industry park as large as a small town. With their mobility proposals, the Berlin team aim to show how such a new district can be connected to the German capital city. Here the car with its individual features plays an important role in closing certain gaps in transportation. Subjects such as piloted driving and piloted parking are included in the team’s first ideas.
- “The boundaries between mobility and immobility will be removed.” The team from Boston is starting work using this thesis. The American competitors in the Award are concerned with specific urban development projects that come with high mobility requirements. Automobile technologies such as piloted parking can be of service to urban space by creating gains in space and efficiency in urban infrastructure. As the team see it, technical innovations and the development of urban infrastructure should go hand in hand.
- “Sustainability and progress are not contradictory,” states the team from Mexico City, where the level of urban traffic congestion is among the highest in the world. The team sees crowd-sourcing as an opportunity to solve the problem of traffic hold-ups. The Mexicans are analyzing data streams about traffic flows and mobility behavior, in order to derive solutions for the urban mobility of the future from them. With the data that is collected, traffic can be suitably regulated and mobility in the city improved.
- “Reality and virtuality will merge,” is the thesis of the South Korean team. As a large mobile device, the car moves in the world of the Internet of Everything. Car to Everything and Everything to Car are intended to make life simpler and easier to plan. Audi is contributing experience in the fields of Audi connect and smart displays to the project in Seoul.
The science slam was the conclusion of a working meeting between the international Award teams and the Audi Innovation Team – employees from Technical Development, Design and Product Strategy.
In the fall an international and interdisciplinary jury will choose the winning project of the Audi Urban Future Award 2014, which comes with prize money of 100,000 euros. All contributions to the science slam are available on the website of the Audi Urban Future Initiative (https://audi-urban-future.com). The team members regularly get in touch here by means of blogs, reporting on the status of their projects.
