Engineering For Sustainable Road Mobility

Road mobility is an area with extreme environmental and sustainability impact. It influences the environment all along the product and production lifecycle through material and energy consumption, emissions and significant land use. Beyond this, its social and economic impacts are high so that sustainability is affected across all dimensions.Automotive manufacturers have started to understand the relevance of their sustainability impact. They, however, still fail to develop mobility products, which could stand up to a serious sustainability and lifecycle assessment.This contribution discusses today's approaches to road mobility as well as related pitfalls and confusions in sustainability assessment. Consequently, it proposes an alternative approach to mobility based on light, efficient and user-oriented (i. e. “lean”) road mobility products against the background of efficiency, consistency and sufficiency, and it draws conclusions for future engineering processes.