By 2030, more than 60 percent of the world’s population will live in cities, which raises the central questions:
How can we realise individual mobility in more and more densely populated urban areas? What concepts do we need to be able to organise traffic in a resource-efficient and climate-friendly manner?
The BMW Group has a very clear answer for that. When it comes to shaping future mobility, we consider the entire value chain, with the aim of making it as sustainable as possible. Protection of the environment is accorded just as much importance as social compatibility and commercial viability. The challenges of urban mobility, in particular, not only require different vehicle products, but also new kinds of mobility services. Flexibility is, therefore, the key to success.
Under the BMW i brand, as well as visionary vehicle concepts, the BMW Group offers innovative services and solutions to improve urban mobility. These intelligent, integrated services are not only seamlessly connected into everyday life, but also create synergies between themselves – from car-sharing to locating and using public charging stations to finding parking spaces.
The future of transport
There is one vehicle concept that currently underlines the leading role of the BMW Group in the future of mobility: the BMW Vision iNEXT. It is a great example for a concept car that represents the new era of sheer driving pleasure. Automated, emission-free and fully connected, it brings together the BMW Group’s strategic innovation fields into a vision vehicle for the first time and provides revealing answers to the question: What does a vehicle, which does not need to be driven by a person, but could, look like?
At the heart of such deliberations are, more than ever, people – with all their emotions and desires.
But the concept car will not only stay a vision. The BMW iNEXT series model will be launched in 2021 and builds resolutely on the idea that first took shape in 2007 with “project i” and evolved into the launch of the BMW i3 in 2013.
The BMW Group has already achieved a great deal on this front: it now has over ten years of experience with electric mobility under its belt in both small-scale and large-scale production, the BMW i models are being improved all the time, and their technology is being employed to gradually electrify models from the BMW and MINI ranges.
The next step now is the complete in-car integration of the strategic innovation fields: autonomy, connectivity, electric and services. More
By Dr Hamid Haqparwar, Managing Director, BMW Group Middle East
