The Future of Global Mobility

Before a packed audience of European and Asian delegates, the German Minister for Transport, Wolfgang Tiefensee, opened the Conference for Global Mobility and Energy for the Future.

"It is imperative to reduce energy consumption, to use the energy that we do use more efficiently and to help renewable energies reach a breakthrough. These are the three central challenges ahead."

He added that these challenges need to be addressed collectively and said that the world's nations had a great responsibility to act together to find common solutions to a common problem, despite the fact that they compete at an economic and political level.

The future is electromobility

In light of the need for a complete overhaul of the global transport system, Tiefensee said that electro-mobility was the future.

Many countries are investing heavily in electric vehicles, including China where the car market is booming. Xu Dehong from the College of Electrical Engineering at Zhejiang University in China explained.

"The government has spent 100 million US dollars to support electric vehicles," he said. "Mainly to support three types of electrical vehicle: fuel cell electric vehicles, hybrid electric vehicles and pure electric vehicles."

Combustion engines are not yet history

But Bernd Hense from the German car firm Daimler was reluctant to place all his bets on electromobility.

"In the future, there will be three big cases of mobility," he said. "Long-stretch travel, overland and regional travel and travel within the city. Let us look at the three types of engines – combustion engines, hybrids and vehicles with electric motors in more detail."

"We will need combustion engines for some time to come, for all overland and long-distance travel, especially in lorries and other heavy vehicles. The combustion engine is not replaceable yet. If we want to get away from oil then we have to find other fuels, renewable fuels for example."

Developing renewable energies

For example biofuels and hydrogen, which, as Klaus Bonhoff from NOW, the national German research and development institute for hydrogen and fuel cells said, "has decisive advantages and perspectives against the backdrop of the three named common aims – reducing emissions, efficiency and diversification."

Critics of renewable energies often cite cost as a reason for their unfeasibility.

But R. Vasu Vasuthewan from the Malaysian firm Mission New Energy rejected this argument: "The difficulty of course is that at the moment bio-fuels are more expensive than fossil fuels. Will it change? Yes it will, with new food stocks being developed and new technologies."

Minister Tiefensee paraphrased Gorbachev in his opening speech, saying that history punishes those who wait. Most environmental experts agree: there is no more time to wait.

Author: Anne Thomas
Editor: Thomas Baerthlein