Abstract

Worldwide, the established models of automobility of the 20th century are increasingly dissolving. As a result, the automotive industry in Germany and Europe, with its enormous economic, employment and innovation policy significance, is coming under pressure. This is happening at a time when the industry is on an expansion course with rising sales, growing employment and further increasing exports. Strong and globally effective megatrends, new mobility requirements in the urbanising transport markets and previously unknown competition, for example from the emerging IT sector, but also from China's industrial policy objectives, are changing our mobility. The accompanying electrification, networking, automation and sharing mobility are revolutionising automobility, leading to a new automobility. Fossil drives are being replaced by electric motor units and storage concepts, self-driving is being replaced by the concepts of assisted, automated and autonomous driving, and ownership is being replaced by the digital platform economy with new business models and forms of distribution. For the automotive industry in Germany and Europe, these developments are cumulating into drastic changes in supply and demand that are calling their previous business model into question. These transformation processes can no longer be managed with automotive policy regulation and internal company self-transformation. Politicians, companies, trade unions and consumers must work together to promote change in the field of automobility. This can only succeed with a pact for the future of mobility that brings together corporate, political and social strategies with the goal of a transformation of transport for society as a whole. It is in the tradition of cooperative management of economic, social and societal change. The political model must be a sustainable and integrated overall transport system, including the automobile as a building block in intermodal chains of action and transport. Above all, the federal government is called upon to coordinate and moderate the processes as a central state actor, together with the federal states and municipalities. It must create the regulatory, fiscal and structural policy framework for action, while companies and politicians should use a transparent consultation mechanism to drive forward the social understanding on a future pact for mobility. As a first step, a politically moderated and regulated consumer-side market transformation programme for electromobility should be established and implemented. The main thing here is to courageously shape consumer behaviour in such a way that demand for new and sustainable products is created. At the European level, the Pact for the Future foresees, for example, the initiation of a project for the technological leap towards electromobility. As part of the market transformation programme, municipalities must also be more strongly and comprehensively empowered to promote municipal laboratories in which both the car industry and public transport operators can develop new forms of cooperation with regard to the new mobility.

Authors

Bormann, René; Fink, Philipp; Holzapfel, Helmut; Rammler, Stephan; Sauter-Servaes, Thomas; Tiemann, Heinrich; Waschke, Thomas; Weirauch, Boris