Mobility as a Service (MaaS)

New Age of Mobility

Evolution has always been synonymous with change, and these changes are influenced by the evolution of technology which is becoming faster and faster.

After hundreds of years on horseback, we moved to the use of the automobile, thanks to the innovation brought first by Henry Ford, who with mass production allowed everyone to own a car, contributing to congestion on the roads with the traffic we know well.

Cities and homes have evolved and structured around the use of the car for mobility, and now a new era of adaptation begins around a new concept of mobility, starting from Smart Roads and reaching new mobility opportunities.

The Smart Road is a new concept of road that allows interconnection between the vehicles that travel on it. Smart Roads aim to provide multiple services, including traffic flow diversion services in the event of accidents or suggestions for alternative trajectories. This new type of road can also impose speed interventions to avoid traffic situations or facilitate timely interventions in the event of emergencies. In this case, Blockchain is useful for toll payment or for Internet of Things services connected to the vehicle.

The development of this New Age of Mobility takes shape in the creation of a new concept of mobility, and to do this, vehicle manufacturers have come together to create MOBI.

Their intention is to build digital infrastructures for smart vehicles and the IoT economy, capable of accelerating the adoption of Blockchain technology and making transport more efficient and sustainable.

For this evolution of mobility, MOBI has identified 5 different necessary technologies.

The acronym for these 5 technologies is best known as BASIC:

• Blockchain

A tamper-proof registry required to manage transactions and enable entities – be they vehicles, infrastructures, people, objects, or organizations – to exchange currencies, or to coordinate behaviors and give instructions.

• Artificial Intelligence

This will allow vehicles to become increasingly autonomous, not only in terms of movement but also in their ability to carry out transactions between vehicle and vehicle (V2V) and between vehicle and everything else (V2X). Autonomous vehicles, and more generally Artificial Intelligence, will radically change not only mobility but the entire economy.

• Services

Digital technologies are transforming products into services. We are seeing a rapid acceleration of the so-called MaaS – Mobility as a Service – and consumption models based not on ownership but on real usage.

Automakers will sell fewer and fewer cars to “vehicle owners,” increasing their mobility and fleet management services.

Insurance companies themselves increasingly see their future in offering usage-based services, no longer based on a flat annual fee model.

• Internet of things

Improvements in connectivity, speed, sensors, and computing power are transforming vehicles and infrastructures (roads, road signs, charging stations, etc.) into true IoT dedicated nodes. The new technologies that vehicles are equipped with allow them to collect more and more telemetry data, and to extract and share important insights from them.

• Connectivity

Not only vehicles, but people themselves are becoming more and more connected. Almost half of the world’s population owns a smartphone, meaning billions of people constantly connected to the network and e-commerce platforms. Vehicles thus become a “fourth screen” and an additional access point to these commercial platforms.

What will be the future evolution?

Since its establishment in May 2018, MOBI has set the goal of evolving the entire mobility ecosystem.

Before the adoption of any revolutionary technology, industries need standards and specifications to build the infrastructure foundation, enabling the creation of products and services that can communicate and work together.

However, standards alone are not enough for a truly disruptive adoption of a new technology. It is therefore necessary for these standards to be adopted and implemented by a community that enables scalability through specific usage experiences.

We must therefore wait for MOBI’s developments to begin testing this new mobility model ourselves, which will revolutionize the way we conceive of travel.