The program included Dr. Norbert Reithofer, CEO of BMW; Dieter Posch, Hesse province minister of state for transportation; Cem Ozdemir, chairman of the German Green Party; Parag Khanna, senior fellow of the New America Foundation; Dr. Barbara Lenz director of the Institute of Transport Research at the German Aerospace Centre; historian Dr. Kurt Moser and noted German future fiction writer Frank Schatzing.
Their remarks had more to do with the situation in Germany, but there are things North Americans should be thinking about, too.
Posch says any change in transportation requires changes in standards, values and urban structure.
"Mobility doesn’t mean simply building infrastructure but understanding the motivation of people to move."
He sees an ongoing change in the significance of the auto. Vehicles are now kept an average of eight years in Germany, he says, adding that mobility is absolutely possible without the automobile.
Discussing electric vehicles he says he’d rather see electrically-propelled trucks which would cut fuel consumption and drastically reduce noise.
Change will have to occur on current infrastructure which must be more efficient but "the objective must be that no one should be restricted in mobility. It must be affordable for everyone."
Fiction writer Frank Schatzing was at one time creative director for Toyota in Germany.
He says global markets have resulted in vehicles that "don’t meet our standards or our needs" and adds that electric mobility will be the best answer in the future.
He branded market research a failure.
"Market researchers can’t tell me about the individual needs of a single person so they concentrate on target groups," he says. "Target groups can only confirm the present".
“We’ve gone from a nation that wanted to do everything correctly to a nation that wants to avoid mistakes. There’s a lack of courage to do something cheeky.
"Technology as such is nothing evil," he says. "It is something positive."
Reithofer says car companies need time to make large changes. "We must put ourselves in 2020 and look at what changes you need to make now to achieve the goals set for 2025. If you have a vehicle life cycle of seven years, you only have one and a half life cycles and you’re in 2021. If, in 2018, you see you made a mistake, you have no response time."
He points out that BMW agreed to a CO2 emissions goal of 95 grams by 2025 "and we have developed the i-car".
"This is not an alibi car. We’ve gone from 200 grams to 150 grams and it has cost us billions. To go from 150 to 95 grams we need plug-in hybrids, turbocharging, e-vehicles and three-cylinder engines."