Accelerate the renewal of the fleet, since in Italy almost 4 cars out of 10 (39%) are more than 15 years old. Allow the safe use of vehicles with advanced driver assistance systems and encourage the introduction of automatically guided vehicles, digitalizing infrastructures and adapting road surfaces and signs. It’s still: accelerate the regulatory process that enables the use of vehicles with advanced autonomous driving systems, integrate young people’s training courses with modules relating to the use of driving assistance systems, promote information campaigns on the benefits of driving assistance systems and specialist analyzes to highlight the possible impact of driving assistance equipment on road accidents and automatic driving. These are – according to “THE CAR OF TOMORROW: safe, sustainable and accessible”, the Report of the Caracciolo Foundation, presented this morning in Rome, at the 76th “Traffic and Circulation Conference” – the six essential points to ensure that, also in Italy, automation and electrification can revolutionize mobility, making it safer, more efficient and greener.
Six necessary steps
There are also six steps necessary to tackle, in an eco-rational way, the path towards the desired elimination of greenhouse gas emissions: covering the growing demand for electricity with renewable sources, reducing dependence on fossil fuels; address – in a technologically neutral way – the issue of “alternative” fuels, jointly evaluating the emission coefficient and efficiency; grasp the progress of battery chemistry and enhance its storage potential for renewable overproduction phases; evaluate, in policies to support renewal, all the options that allow the carbon impact reduction objectives to be achieved in a rational way; encourage sustainable car purchasing and driving behavior, using the possibilities offered by available technologies; introduce the essential elements of the different fuel systems and related engines into the courses for acquiring a driving license.
Angelo Sticchi Damiani
“The mobility of tomorrow – declared the President of the ICA – it will be a complex ecosystem. To get there, we need to work today on a set of critical issues that require an integrated system of actions, coordinated by a long-term policy that favors the technological evolution of vehicles, the modernization of road and energy infrastructures, the adaptation of legislation and the diffusion of a new culture of responsible and sustainable mobility for all”.
Giuseppina Fusco
According to the President of the Caracciolo Foundation and Vice President of ACI, “to translate the virtuous scenarios envisaged in the programs into concrete and rational policies, it is necessary to maintain a ‘realistic and technologically neutral approach’, which takes into account the important goals achieved by our industry, by virtue of ingenuity and investments in research and development that Italy has carried out in recent years. A significant contribution to the decarbonisation of mobility can come from advanced biofuels, which can already be used in vehicles in circulation, which offer emission levels similar to those of electric vehicles and even lower energy consumption. Not to mention the benefits in terms of the circular economy.”
New technologies and autonomous driving
New technologies can offer a decisive contribution to road safety, especially considering the fact that, in our country, human error is responsible for approximately 90% of road accidents. Analyzing the Aci-Istat averages on road accidents over the last 10 years, in Italy, modern safety systems could have avoided 28% of frontal accidents, 21% of lateral accidents and 11% of accidents involving pedestrians . In the next 15 years, according to the European Commission, the increasingly advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and the most advanced autonomous driving features will be able to save over 25 thousand lives and avoid at least 140 thousand serious injuries. In our country, however, only cars with level 1 and 2 automation systems can circulate. The current legislation, in fact, does not yet allow higher level self-driving vehicles to enter the market and the road infrastructure is not yet adequate to the requirements of partially autonomous systems.
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