138 PART | III ITS business models
12.2.4 Comfort and enabling of user’s freedom
Increasing the comfort of driving mainly refers to increasing the degrees of free-
dom for drivers while reducing car accidents and avoiding injuries and fatalities.
At the same time, it is important to reduce time to reach the destination and pro-
vide smoother mobility that avoids traffic jams and congestions. Autonomous
driving can be a solution to the direction of comfortable and safe transportation
without congestions and accidents. Autonomous driving presupposes the exis-
tence of holistic ITS solutions, through already developed key insights and tech-
nologies to enable the path toward autonomous driving. Autonomous vehicles
must be able to detect traffic and weather conditions, identify moving objects
such as other vehicles, bikes, and pedestrians and predict their trajectories at any
condition (with reduced light, darkness, rain, fog, or snow). Thus, it is necessary
to develop solutions that provide reliable and multiredundant perception and
propulsion systems that are based on human-like control enabled by cognitive
intelligence, knowledge, and noncausal reasoning.
12.2.5 Sustainability, energy efficiency, and environment
Another dimension of societal impact concerns the reduction of mobility’s envi-
ronmental footprint. Not only Europe’s environmental conscious societies are
eagerly looking forward to the integration of clean mobility into their urban
lives. The global trend for sustainability is obvious, and automated driving is
moving forward driven by significant progress with attractive market-oriented
cars. There is a push on many levels (global, EU, national, and organizational)
to refine and implement enabling technologies and systems with the effect of
fundamental change to our road transport paradigms and embracing the pos-
sibilities promised by the transition to automated vehicles. The transition phase
from early adopters to the mass market is progressing, with a general and grow-
ing awareness that the underlying technology to implement automated driving
is gaining a sufficient level of maturity. As mentioned earlier, ITS will harmo-
nize the traffic flow due to foresighted-driving based on knowledge about the
other traffic participants and its intelligence to generate the energy optimum
speed profile.
According to the analysis of Morgan Stanley, ITSs offer the potential for
more than 20% fuel savings, corresponding to 541 billion liters per year and
corresponding to about 500 billion US$. 541 billion liters of saved fuel can
directly be translated into corresponding savings of CO 2 and other emissions.
Moreover, ITSs offer significant potential to increase road-network capacity.
This potential was estimated by Morgan Stanley to amount up to 80% compared
to the current status. Traffic flow harmonization in combination with knowl-
edge about the movement and trajectories of other relevant traffic participants
allows driving at higher speeds in shorter distances. This saves space and helps
to reduce congestion. Further potential to reduce traffic jam could be generated