Background

In many urban environments, private automobile use has led to severe problems with respect to congestion, energy (our dependency on oil resources), pollution, noise, safety and general degradation of the quality of life. Therefore, historical cities centres are facing severe problems, traditional commerce in them declines, moving to the periphery, and they become less attractive to tourists. Although public transport systems have seen many recent improvements (mostly due to information technologies), in many cases the car still offers a much better service at the individual level. A new approach for mobility, emerging now as an alternative solution to the private passenger car, offers the same flexibility and much less nuisances: small automated vehicles form part of the public transportation system and complements mass transit and non-motorised transport, providing passenger service for any location at any time. Such systems can also evolve to provide door to door freight delivery or garbage collection. Experiments are under way in several places in Europe and in Japan and the first operational system (the ParkShuttles) have been in use in the Netherlands since the end of 1997 and is now being expanded.

This concept started with car-sharing: a fleet of individual vehicles shared among a relatively large number of users, offers the possibility of using a car for some time or having a car available at both ends of a train trip. These systems are increasingly popular in Switzerland and Germany. Specific vehicles, well-adapted to city driving, have generally been used for these systems: small size, convenient, energy efficient, quiet, often based on electric power. They even compete with public transportation in terms of energy consumption on per passenger-km basis. To date, these systems have not generally proven that they can compete economically, one reason being limited vehicles availability in too few locations, thus limiting the number of potential customers (see European Project Utopia).

A novel form of vehicle-sharing is now appearing, mostly in Europe, based on automated vehicles, avoids this problem of availability (anywhere and anytime). The car has automated driving capabilities on an existing road infrastructure, with a right of way similar to dedicated bus-lanes. Some vehicles also allow traditional manual driving for running in normal traffic. In such cases, they are called dual-mode and their automated capabilities allow them to be collected and distributed by platooning or remote control.

The advantages of autonomous driving capabilities and the new transportation systems, based on environmental friendly vehicles, are numerous. First, they provide reduction of congestion, and better traffic flow, air quality and energy conservation. Second, the system (in its automatic mode) is much safer than manual driving, and there is no need for a drivers' license so anybody can use it, including also people with handicaps and in particular elderly persons. Third, the cars can be moved easily from one location to another, using fully autonomous driving platoon formations with a single driver. Fourth, the cars can drive autonomously to a remote parking area when not needed, hence leaving valuable urban space free for pedestrians and cyclists. Fifth, the concept and technologies are also appropriate for delivery of goods in city centers and even for garbage collection : the same infrastructure could be used by specifically adapted vehicles with delivery (or collection) “boxes”. Finally, flexible design will make it possible to optimize the overall system performance, taking into account the needs and requirements of the private consumer, the system operator and the public (e.g. municipality), permitting the system to operate in different modes at different times of the day, week and year.

Several companies and research organizations have been involved, before the start of the project, in the development of these new vehicles, which we now call cybercars. The first system has been in operation in the Netherlands since the end of 1997, running successfully 24 hours a day with four vehicles.

Project

The Project's main objective was to accelerate the development and the diffusion of this novel transportation system by improving the performances and lowering the cost. This was achieved by bringing together all European actors of this field, in order to test and exchange best practices, share some of the development work and make faster progress in the experiments. Several cities throughout Europe have collaborated with the partners in the Project, studying the potentiality to run such systems, providing their specific constraints and accepting to do some preliminary tests of technologies and demonstrations. A major part of the work involved the improvement and testing of key technologies for better guidance, collision avoidance, energy utilisation and fleet management and the development of simple, standard user interfaces.

The project was able to improve significantly the performances of these technical systems or to lower their cost. A good example is the development of a guidance technology based on navigation and recalibration on magnets in the ground. All these improvements will now help the companies providing these transportation systems by lowering their costs while improving the performances and in particular the safety. The initial targets of 30% have been exceeded in several cases.

Another significant outcome of the project is the detailed implementation guidelines which can help the manufacturers and the operator to achieve the highest safety for their system. These guidelines have been put to test successfully in the installation of several systems.

Finally, the project has performed a thorough dissemination activity during the entire length of its life with a very active web site (www.cybercars.org), numerous scientific papers and conferences, excellent media coverage and several technical demonstrations in cities such as the final one in Antibes, now available on a DVD.

At the end of the CyberCars project, it can be said that the concept has gained worldwide acceptance as can be testified in the document "Mobility 2030" [reference: Mobility 2030: meeting the challenges to sustainability; World Business Council for Sustainable Mobility, July, 2004] and several high profile projects are now on the way.

In particular, two new projects are now funded by the European Commission : CyberCars-2 which is a continuation of CyberCars focussed on cooperative behavior of cybercars and CityMobil which focuses on large scale implementations.

An overview of all activities about cybercars can also be found on the cybercar portal.