Exploitable results Sustainable city mobility Transport is one of the most, if not the most relevant problem faced by today's European cities, leading to problems of congestion, energy consumption, pollutant emissions, loss of green belts, occupancy of public spaces and health and safety. Although passenger transport is usually perceived as the main cause of mobility-related problems, recent studies have proved that freight transport impact is also an issue: 30 - 40 % of energy consumed for transport in cities is due to freight transport. Recent attempts to have a cleaner mobility based on low polluting vehicles, for either research or demonstration purposes, have been successful in demonstrating that cleaner vehicles are technically feasible. Yet they have failed to launch a real market for non-polluting vehicles. Low impact buses have been tested in research projects and proved to be much less polluting than conventional ones, but have not been commonly adopted by city public transport companies because of their higher price. To lower the impact of mobility on cities, cleaner vehicles are not enough: an integrated passenger and freight strategy must be adopted. Cleaner vehicles must be specifically designed for the purpose and proven to be better than conventional ones in any aspect, including costs. The progress made so far is mainly related to the definition of the vehicle's technical specifications, representing the guiding input for the whole design phase (enclosing both chassis and powertrain), which is now completed. The main achievements of the initial study were the definition of the HOST prototype as a whole, in terms of dimension and bulk of the platform (chassis and suspension) as well as the various boxes constituting the powertrain and the human machine interface. The results obtained confirm that a common powertrain can accomplish the four tasks selected by adding modules for extra energy storage or an auxiliary power unit. A particular reference has been reserved for the transhipment system where the HOST concept has to carry a device that enables the prototype to tranship the cabin and/or body vehicle as an intermodal transport unit in a practical way and therefore let the vehicle enter into logistic process flows. Fulfilling all these objectives will lead to the design and construction of a vehicle which could economically supply freight and passenger services in cities and allow, if adopted in combination with some accompanying measures, city mobility to become more sustainable. Searching for OpenAIRE data... There was an error trying to search data from OpenAIRE No results available
