Today commercial transport in urban areas faces major challenges. These include making optimal use of limited space, avoiding empty trips, meeting driver shortages as well as reducing costs and emissions such as CO₂, particulate matter and noise. The mutual acceleration and reinforcement of technological trends such as electrification, digitization and automation may enable new vehicle and mobility concepts that can meet these challenges. One possible vehicle concept is presented in this article. It is based on on-the-road modularization, i.e., a vehicle that can change different transport capsules during operation. The vehicle is divided into an electrically propelled autonomous drive unit and a transport unit. Standardized interfaces between these units enable the easy design of capsules for different uses, while the drive unit can be used universally. Business models and operating strategies that allow optimal use of this vehicle concept are discussed in depth in the article. First, the current situation is analyzed followed by a detailed description of an exemplary business model using a business model canvas. The operating strategies and logistics concepts are illustrated and compared with conventional concepts.

Companies facing transformation in the automotive industry will need to adapt to new trends, technologies and functions, in order to remain competitive. The challenge is to anticipate such trends and to forecast their development over time. The aim of this paper is to develop a methodology that allows us to analyze the temporal development of technologies, taking automated driving as an example. The framework consists of a technological and a functional roadmap. The technology roadmap provides information on the temporal development of 59 technologies based on expert elicitation using a multi-stage Delphi survey and patent analyses. The functional roadmap is derived from a meta-analysis of studies including 209 predictions of the maturity of automated driving functions. The technological and functional roadmaps are merged into a consolidated roadmap, linking the temporal development of technologies and functions. Based on the publication analysis, SAE level 5 is predicted to be market-ready by 2030. Contrasted to the results from the Delphi survey in the technological roadmap, 2030 seems to be too optimistic, however, as some key technologies would not have reached market readiness by this time. As with all forecasts, the proposed framework is not able to accurately predict the future. However, the combination of different forecast approaches enables users to have a more holistic view of future developments than with single forecasting methods.

In order to reduce the environmental impacts caused by the transport sector, autonomous and electrified on-the-road modular vehicles (otrm) could be a solution. By separating the drive unit from the transport unit, they enable use cases for various transport tasks and reduce individual and motorized transport and its generated emissions. Therefore, the goal of this study is to assess the environmental impacts from cradle to grave by applying the LCA methodology for a defined otrm—the U-Shift—vehicle fleet considering a specific use case relative to a reference vehicle fleet. The results indicate that the U-Shift fleet reduces the life cycle environmental impacts in a range of 3–28% for all of the seven impact categories, which are analyzed in detail. While emissions from the use phase are similar, U-Shift has an environmental benefit in the production phase due to a low amount of resource-intensive driveboards. Considering the early development stage of U-Shift, several measures are discussed, addressing the material and configuration aspects of the vehicles as well as optimized use case applications, which promise further impact-reduction potential.