Periodic Reporting for period 1 - GIANTS (Green Intelligent Affordable New Transport Solutions)
Berichtszeitraum: 2024-01-01 bis 2025-06-30
The GIANTS project addresses the growing challenges of sustainable urban and suburban mobility by developing a frugal, zero-emission L-type vehicle platform tailored to both advanced and emerging markets. GIANTS vehicles are designed for modularity, mission adaptability, and lifecycle sustainability, from solar-supported charging to end-of-life recyclability. The project seeks to close the gap between today’s niche L-category vehicles, which lack versatility, and oversized M- and N1-vehicles, which are cost-intensive and overengineered. By introducing modular “technology bricks” such as swappable batteries, standardized control systems, and solar integration, GIANTS enables affordable and locally manufacturable solutions that strengthen regional value chains. In doing so, the project supports global decarbonization goals while fostering collaboration between European partners and stakeholders in Asia and Africa. The expected impact extends beyond emission reduction, contributing to greener cities, improved social sustainability, and scalable solutions for future-proof urban transport worldwide.
The GIANTS project has advanced significantly by systematically analysing stakeholder needs through surveys, interviews, and persona-based segmentation, resulting in the creation of the Mission Suitability and Social Index (MSSI). This index quantitatively analyses technical, economic, and social requirements, ensuring that vehicle design choices balance the often-conflicting demands of end-users, fleet operators, and regulators. Building on this foundation, a modular e-driveline architecture was specified, incorporating standardized sub-assemblies such as swappable batteries, solar charging kits, and a unified vehicle control system. To validate and optimise these solutions, a co-simulation platform was developed, integrating electrical, thermal, and mechanical models for predictive performance and lifetime assessment. These technical achievements have been consolidated into demonstrator vehicle concepts, benchmarked against existing L-category solutions and tailored for diverse use cases in both advanced and emerging markets. Together, these outcomes provide the scientific and technical basis for the GIANTS platform to deliver frugal, adaptable, and sustainable urban mobility solutions.
The GIANTS project has gone beyond the state of the art in several directions. Within WP2, the Mission Suitability and Social Index (MSSI) was developed, a novel tool that systematically integrates technical, economic, and social dimensions into vehicle design and adoption pathways. In particular the Mission Suitability helps the understanding and visualization of the level of performance needed/expected by users for urban mobility trips, while the social index addresses the expectations toward the whole mobility system, all stakeholders, including cities & regions who are generally managing social regulations. Within WP3, the E-Motion tool was developed for drive data analysis and electric driveline pre-sizing. This helped the translation of diverse expectations of selected personas from the MSSI into quantifiable high-level technical requirements. Moreover, an extended benchmark analysis of existing L-Category vehicles with around 100 different vehicle variants was realised, which allowed a deep understanding of vehicle system specifications in Emerging and Advanced Markets. Finally, a completely new system architecture was developed by the GIANTS OEMs and suppliers, which offers flexibility of adaptation, scalability, and large scope of OEM auxiliaries.