Growing urbanization, congestion and air pollution in combination with the people’s need for mobility are major challenges of urban areas.
The demand for mobility is changing with and determined by developments arising from intricate interactions of societal, political, technological, environmental, legal and economic trends.
A successful integration of new mobility solutions, such as electrified L-category vehicles (EL-Vs), requires a basic understanding and proof of the individual consumer benefits.
Smaller, lighter and more specialized than other vehicles, EL-Vs have the potential to save users’ time, energy consumption and space required for manoeuvring and parking, in a co-modal vehicle sharing framework. However, they still represent a niche market, mainly due to cost, limited comfort, and lack of public information and direct user experience.
A significant market penetration of EL-Vs will radically change the composition of urban traffic but requires a mind-shift among users/customers – which, proofed to be successfully achieved if the benefits for the individual user of EL-Vs are clear and evident.
STEVE demonstrated a human-centric vision for EL-V-based mobility, using low-cost, connected quadricycles and seamless embedded e-Bike service, for the demonstration of urban electro-Mobility-as-a-Service (eMaaS), with the following four objectives successfully achieved by STEVE project:
O1: Detailed market analysis on EL-Vs and related services
O2: Implementation of new energy-efficiency and customer-oriented services for EL-Vs, based on a gamification approach rewarding the virtuous behaviours of the users
O3: Demonstration of the wide range of EL-V typologies and services
O4: Analysis of the operation of EL-Vs in real scenarios and policy recommendations
Along these objectives, the work carried out focused on the voice of the customer and made use of smart services for comfort. The deployment of STEVE EL-V based mobility services took place in four demonstration cities followed by an assessment of the user experience to formulate recommendations. The summary of results is published in a STEVE White Paper, available for download on the STEVE public homepage (www.steve-project.eu).
