“30 percent of cars would be enough”

The rise of car sharing and self-drive electric vehicles could drastically reduce the number of cars on urban roads, according to Christian Hochfeld, head of new transport think tank Agora Verkehrswende*. “If a city’s entire car fleet was shared and self-driving, only 20 to 30 percent of today’s cars would be necessary,” Hochfeld said in an interview with Zeit Online. This would not necessarily translate into a massive fall in production for carmakers, because the cars would be used much more intensively, reducing their service life.

Read the interview in German here.

Find background on German carmakers’ new mobility plans in the new CLEW factsheets Dieselgate forces VW to embrace green mobility and Reluctant Daimler plans “radical” push into new mobility world.

*Like Agora Energiewende and the Clean Energy Wire, Agora Verkehrswende is funded by the Stiftung Mercator and the European Climate Foundation.