Beyond Cars

Imagine the following situation: You are traveling in your city and want to buy a train ticket: There's an app for that. Or you want to order a cab or a car via a car sharing provider. There's another app for that. You want to drive the final leg using an e-scooter? Another app. Your smartphone will likely soon be full of apps from the dozens of mobility providers that exist today.

That is neither user-friendly nor efficient. The reason for this complex web of applications is clear: A lack of data ecosystems. These are the prerequisites for networked mobility that connect offers and means of transportation across applications, systems and providers. At best, public authorities are also part of the ecosystem so that you can quickly and digitally store your driver's license data when renting a car via app.

This networking is not an end in itself. By integrating relevant data points in an overall system, we can continuously improve our mobility while making it more environmentally friendly.

To shape the mobility of the future, we need a new legal framework that takes an ambitious approach to the topic and thinks even bigger about the digital, networked mobility – even across sectors. Mobility must be rethought in the future, and with it the automobile and its role. The focus here is on a smart balance between individual and public mobility, reducing the environmental impact, smooth, intermodal coordination across all modes of transport at all stages of the mobility chains and new usage models that offer more options than just “owning” and “renting".

With this digital, networked mobility, data security and data sovereignty are important aspects. GAIA-X considers this topic. GAIA-X is a project for establishing a secure and trustworthy data infrastructure. The foundations for this are currently being laid. Every participant in these data ecosystems wants to have more security over their data. On the one hand, this applies to data that is used and, on the other hand, to the data that is entered individually into the network. One example for this is the “Mobilithek” – Germany’s platform for mobility data.

In the new episode of the msg podcast “radically digital”, our mobility experts Stefan Klinge and Nadine Roming talk about how this transformation successfully takes place and why the mobility system of the future must be built on a foundation of data.