Translator: Nicoletta Pedrana
World's human population, over the last 2000 years,
has always been relatively small:
no more than a hundred million people.
Then, about 150 years ago, something happened:
the Industrial Revolution,
the invention of vaccines and antibiotics
and many other things
have triggered a genuine demographic explosion.
In 150 years, a few hundred million
grew up to north of seven billion of us on Earth today.
Not bad.
But these seven billion people consume a lot of resources,
and burn a lot of oil, coal, natural gas.
And that created a very big problem,
which you can see illustrated in an extremely succint way
in this picture.
Essentially, in 150 years we've burned fossil fuels
for an equivalent of 2000 Giga Tonnes of CO2,
of greenhouse gases.
Alas, this led to an increase
in the average temperature of the planet
of more than one degree, which is a lot.
Mankind has a big problem now:
we know we absolutely cannot break the threshold
of plus two degrees of global warming;
so somehow mankind has some sort of residual budget
of about 1500/2000 Giga Tonnes of CO2.
But the most disturbing, worrying thing that few people know,
is that this budget corresponds
to a very small fraction - much less than ten percent -
of all the equivalent of oil, coal, natural gas.
Long story short, mankind will have to endure an enormous effort
to leave underground,
resist the temptation to [extract]
all this immense amount of fossil fuels
which could turn into CO2,
and thus further increasing the temperature.
All industrial sectors, today, are trying to address
this huge problem of ours.
In particular, the field of mobility, transport,
which is responsible for about 25-30 percent of these emissions,
is trying to transition from an old mobility model,
that we can essentially synthesize
in large, fossil-fuelled machines,
personally owned, obviously driven by humans,
to a completely different mobility model,
one where cars will be, on average,
much smaller, electric or hydrogen powered,
shared and self-driving.
These are the so-called four mega mobility trends,
what's going to happen in the next 20, 30 years.
But I wanted to emphasize
that there is one of these that is a little special:
the automation of driving.
Driving automation is a very special factor
because it will act as a kind of catalyst.
In fact, it will accelerate the transition to mobility as a service -
so no longer owned cars, but let's say a shared car
that we will use as a public car -
which in turn will promote the car shrinkage
and the completion of the electrification process.
So driver automation, car automation,
it's somwhow gonna be a kind of big bang.
of this revolution in future mobility.
Very well.
As a consequence, there will be a sort of bifurcation.
There are forty million cars in Italy today.
These private cars perform both functional aspects,
so not only I go from A to B,
but they also have an aspect related to driving pleasure,
to the pleasure of ownership.
These two aspects will decouple, and will be clearly attributed:
one to some cars, which we call robotaxes,
that will look purely functional,
therefore they will be autonomous, shared, purely functional cars;
then there will be a small niche of emotional cars,
that are likely to remain privately owned,
surely they will remain not autonomous,
and will essentially achieve a goal,
of driving pleasure, of the pleasure of owning the car.
I would point out that this transition
will have a very important effect on the efficiency of mobility.
There are, I was saying, 40 million cars in Italy today.
Moving on to this model of shared and autonomous mobility,
this number is likely to become four - five million at most,
therefore a huge efficiency and resources saving
compared to the huge number of cars
that invade the land today, and are idle most of the time.
How do you see this number, this reduction by a factor of ten?
It can be done in a very sophisticated way;
or, to give the idea,
simply by looking at the simultaneity of use
during rush hour.
Take any weekday between seven and eight am.
and you will discover that, in reality,
only 10% of cars are used in any given moment.
This is the peak of contemporary usage.
So there is a huge chance to improve the mobility system's efficiency.
Autonomous car, automatic car: where are we now?
We're almost level three today.
There are five levels of automation, and we're almost at level three.
What is Level Three?
Level three is some kind of autopilot.
that we could insert, typically in a highway environment,
and at that point we could actually
disengage from driving, legally and officially
and then read the newspaper or send messages,
or check e-mail,
provided we can get back in control
shouldn't the autopilot be able
to handle the situation anymore.
We're almost there.
This will usher us in a new era,
for in that moment there will be a shift of responsibility,
and also of insurance,
between the human and the AI pilot.
A long journey will start from then on
towards level four and level five.
Level five is the fully autonomous car:
no steering wheel, pedals anymore actually.
It's a very winding path, if you think about it,
for among all the operations we routinely do
driving in complex traffic
ranks among the hardest ones.
So, getting to the point
of total ability to replicate a human's driving dexterity
will still take 10-15 years.
It is by far the biggest technological challenge
in store for the automotive world over the next 10, 20 years.
I wanted to quote you, in this regard,
a rather special event that happened this year.
The so-called "autonomous motorsport" has seen the light,
the race between completely autonomous cars.
I talk you about it because it's not just a game, something for entertainment,
but in fact it represents an important development platform
of difficult, high stake situations, the so-called emergencies.
Think about it: highway, high speed, lots of cars, low grip -
something unexpected happens.
An autonomous car that you'll be sitting on in a few decades.
has to take many wise choices
right away.
Autonomous racing will help us solve
this rare but extremely challenging problem.
At this point, actually, I wanted to move on.
I have talked so far about physical mobility, and it's evolution:
but we actually know
that was an ongoing process even before the pandemic,
which has "just" greatly accelerated
this transition towards the so-called "virtual mobility".
It's easy to understand what it is:
we no longer move physically, but the voice, the images move;
and perhaps, through holograms, our three-dimensional figure.
So this is virtual mobility,
which potentially replaces the physical mobility of people.
So, if on the one hand physical mobility
will undergo what I call a "uberization" process
that is, towards mobility as a service,
probably, on the other hand,
another type of mobility will expand very quickly
that even here, with a neologism, let me call “amazonization”.
What does that mean?
People will move less and less,
but at this point the objects will have to reach people.
And so an already underway exponential growth will gain steam,
of all things transport and logistics' mobility:
people don't move, but things do.
So, future technology is expected to develop
not only autonomous cars, which carry us,
but also objects to transport things in a completely automated way.
You see here little robots delivering pizza,
or, in a slightly more visionary way - this is a vision of Continental -
even the postman robot dog
who delivers the package to you in the mailbox.
Let's play a game.
Let's try to figure out,
to project us in 30 years
in one of our cities,
and wonder what we're going to see, what scenarios we might see.
I'll throw two of them at you.
Then 30 years from now, we'll find out what the right one is.
Scenario number one.
Cities will be clear of cars:
there will be few, small, electric, automatic,
extremely safe cars-
and therefore they will not hit children, dogs, bicycles, etc., etc.
Cities are now free to promote the so-called soft, or active mobility,
like going out for a walk,
use bicycles, e-bikes, scooters and so on.
This is scenario number one.
There is a second scenario in which, instead,
somehow digital mobility will have taken over;
and we will therefore experience our mobility
in parallel worlds filled by avatars, metaverses and the like.
I would like to point out
that in this second, more or less disturbing scenario -
everyone can have their say here, I do not judge it -
there will be a paradox of cities that will be densely populated,
but with probably deserted streets,
for everything will have converged towards virtual mobility.
Obviously there will be the little robots, who will bring pizza home,
but basically the roads will be freed
by today's people mobility.
There will be another very likely reason:
cities will somehow empty themselves of their population,
or in any case a trend will be reversed.
You can see it in this figure:
in the last 50 years,
there has been a relentless trend towards urbanization:
more and more, people have always moved
from rural areas to cities.
It's very likely, and the post-pandemic is here to prove it,
that there will be a reversal of the trend towards rural areas,
because jobs are there, and more and more will be,
that can be done in a completely digital way.
At that point, a completely digital job
allows the worker to be completely detached,
separated from the workplace.
These new figures are also called "digital nomads",
because they can afford nomadism:
their work doesn't change, it's always the same,
but in fact it is not associated with a precise geographical location.
And at this point these digital nomads, this new category of workers,
can easily afford to return to the countryside.
So we could see our cities depopulated,
and the countryside repopulated:
not with farmers, but with these digital nomads
that will essentially work with digital tools
in front of a computer.
A teasing question now.
Design and define a large city car park today,
that will perhaps be decided in two years' time
and it will be built, and finally put in place,
towards the end of this decade,
is a good idea?
Think about it.
Thank you.
(Applause)