Transport, logistics and electric vehicles The industry restarts from green mobility
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«Turin’s industry must start again from its ability to solve problems. But with the courage to understand that the current ones are different from the past and enhancing skills. For example, translating the metalworking ones to the world of aerospace.” The invitation from Marco Pironti, professor of Economics and innovation management at the University of Turin, makes clear the future challenge of the Piedmontese capital in the mobility sector. With electric vehicles advancing and new technologies on the launch pad, yesterday morning the Turin round table of the Milan-Turin-Genoa Mobility Conference 2024, hosted by the Industrial Union, reeled off the most varied themes: from sustainability to energy sources, from innovation to projects in the field. Entitled «Battery Swap, enabling technology for sustainable mobility and Smart Cities», the meeting collected reflections on the transport universe and the idea of the city to come.
On this last point, the Smart Cities and Innovation manager of the City of Turin, Elena Deambrogio, underlined the capacity for entrepreneurial attraction thanks to Torino City Lab, an open innovation platform founded in 2018. «The startup community within it is constantly expanding – he explained -. The DNA of urban testing remains strong and an example of this is the Reefilla company which in Turin experimented with a mobile charging system for cars and improved 5G connectivity systems”. The next projects? «The To Move project started recently – said Deambrogio -, which provides a single city app to coordinate the different modes of public transport and cooperative driving solutions. In this context, approximately 2 million euros will be invested in smart mobility projects. Another two will go to develop circular economy ones thanks to a fund under MetroPlus 2021-27″. There is also a lot of curiosity about the topic of battery swapping, i.e. the replacement of the exhausted battery of an electric vehicle with one already charged in special hubs and columns.
China has already grasped its potential for its public transport fleet and now clocks battery changes in just 20 seconds. In the global market, the next frontier looks at trucks that travel long distances. For the CEO of Eurofork, Maurizio Traversa, «in Europe it takes longer than in China. With this technology, electric cars don’t stop for charging at charging stations and save time. Furthermore, instead of grounding cables and then redoing the roads, battery swap areas are created with less impact on the city, similar to old petrol stations.”
However, huge investments are needed. As well as designs calibrated to the millimetre. There are some Iveco projects that go in this direction. Including one that involves transforming the use of old refueling stations into hubs that also contain battery storage centers. Another suggestion were the modular and ergonomic vehicles capable of collecting four batteries and calibrating the weight of goods, illustrated by Iveco’s Advance Design manager, Michele Deconcini.
Among the most complex challenges is the end of life of the batteries themselves. For this reason, the segment director of STMicroelectronics Automotive, Max Vizzini, remarked that «there is still no evaluation system on the life of the battery that has finished its cycle. Just as there is no standardization of vehicles that optimizes technologies and semi-conductors.”
Lots of attention also on the more general topic of electrification. The e-mobility project manager of the Iren group, Ruggero Garibaldi, underlined how «today the company has around 400 vehicles transformed into electric, equal to almost 80% of the fleet. The total cost of ownership has halved in the virtuous circle that includes electrification, appropriate infrastructure and a renewable energy production system.” Even Dhl Express, which moves 50 million shipments a year in Italy, is focusing on electric and green. As the head of Public Affairs, Antonella Sada, explained, «in 2023 throughout the territory we invested in over 300 electric vehicles supported by more than 400 charging stations. We were the first to invest in sustainable fuel in aircraft with an allocation of around 7 billion in the ecological transition until 2030″. —
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