Translator: Ki Yun Lee Reviewer: Lisa Thompson
All right.
Today, obviously, I am going to talk about the future of mobility,
but let me start somewhere else.
For almost 15 years now, I've been studying honeybees.
And bees are very smart.
They are probably the smartest insects.
And that is why they are a, perhaps, infinite source of fascination
and inspiration, at least for me.
Bees are extraordinary explorers and navigators.
They orient themselves
in a radius of up to six kilometers around their hives,
and that is an area much larger than the city of Vicenza.
They remember numerous resource locations,
like food, water supplies and their hives,
and they commute between those locations in astounding accuracy,
and that with a brain the size of a pinhead.
But the individual feats of bees
are only one of the many facets of bee intelligence.
It is together how they solve complex tasks.
They act collectively as a network of tiny brains
linked together through various forms of communication.
They are sharing information, but also energy.
So for example,
a forager bee coming back from a search flight,
she might have not found anything.
She comes back hungry, empty stomach, low on carbohydrates,
and she urgently needs a drop of honey
that would provide energy for her next flight.
But she doesn't go inside the hive.
She just asks a fellow nestmate for an energy snack.
So the bee being begged brings up some nectar
from her social stomach - that's what we call it.
And the hungry bee drinks it and is ready to go.
No need to push through the masses and queue in front of the honey cells.
The process of sharing
turns one centralized, static energy store
into many thousands [of] small, mobile energy stores.
And when I realized that, I had an idea.
So, think of electric cars.
While the media predicts electric cars
to be the future of our mobility,
there's not much demand on the customer side,
despite massive subsidies granted by our national governments.
Take, for example, Germany, my home country,
two years ago, we have approved a purchase incentive scheme
worth one billion euros,
and yet we have not even two percent electric cars.
So why is that?
Well, you know, the first reason is because they are expensive,
because the car batteries are expensive.
And the charging infrastructure is just too sparse,
so owning an electric car
comes with many inconveniences.
The average electric car has just a range of 200 km or less,
and recharging a car battery
isn't, by far, as convenient as filling 60 liters of gasoline in your tank.
That takes two minutes.
So electric cars still need careful planning
and the strict discipline.
Yes, the cost will come down, car batteries will grow in capacity,
but how are we going to charge our cars
when it's not two percent, but 50 percent or 80 percent?
Substantial infrastructural changes have to be made
to meet the energy hunger for tomorrow's cars.
So,
how are we going to make our electric cars
convenient,
cost-efficient,
and environmentally less harming?
Well, the obvious answer for me is we charge them like bees.
And this is how it may work.
We need three components.
First, cars need to ask another car for energy,
and that's already there.
Car-to-car communication has been developed for 20 years.
So that's a check.
Secondly, cars need to be charged.
Well, that's already possible.
Big car manufacturers have just shown that device; many others have followed.
And, you know, this comes with an efficiency of 85 percent,
charging through an air gap.
And now, point three, think of self-driving cars -
you know, all the sophisticated sensors built into our modern cars
to computing equipment.
We don't even have to stop our cars to charge between them.
We can charge our neighbor's car
while driving.
And this is how it may work in the near future.
So imagine you get out of your house in the morning,
you - ahh - you forgot to charge your car.
But don't worry.
The swarm has got your back.
So you tell your car, "I want to go to the office."
Your car sends the destination to a server, where your route is planned.
But it's also compared to many thousands of other traffic participants.
Many of these people did not forget to charge the batteries,
and those are the ones the system schedules to meet you
en route to your office.
This may take a slight detour for you
and may require your partner to slow down a little bit,
maybe wait one minute.
But in the end, you will meet this guy
in space and time, actually, on a common route.
And once both cars meet, your autopilot will control your position,
velocity, and acceleration, depending on how your partner moves.
So if your partner slows down, you will slow down as well;
if he accelerates, you will accelerate as well.
And this control mechanism could be done
1,000 or 10,000 times faster than a human could do that.
Cars can communicate between each other about what they are going to do
and especially how and when this is happening.
And this will allow
a quick and a safe energy transfer between moving cars,
through an air gap.
This road stretch both are traveling on doesn't need to be a long one.
There could be many, many potential donors and dozens of energy snacks
along the route.
You don't even have to charge a car to full or even add some charge;
you just need to consume -
you need to receive as much as you consume.
As long as you arrive at your target
and as long as the other one arrives at his or her target,
everyone will be happy to help
because the swarm has become an energy safety net for everyone.
The swarm is like a virtual power cable
extending from the wall with a plug
through many, many cars to the ones that actually need the charge.
Cars are a sort of mobile power outlet.
And if you think of traffic jams,
they now may even seem less nerve-racking.
And this could even be a business concept.
So, first, we have to convince the car manufacturers
to put our tech into the cars,
but once we've made that,
we have calculated that we could make a lot of money from just helping people.
So, if we had, by the year 2022,
50% of the cars equipped with our tech,
and if we just charge 10% of the energy that is being transferred
as a fee for the service,
an average number of 10 energy snacks per month
would yield a market of seven million euros in Germany alone.
And now think of Europe, think of big markets like China or the U.S.
So, this idea would help those customers
that would like to operate their cars all the time without any stops.
Think of self-driving taxi companies or delivery companies,
they would be able to operate their cars virtually 24/7.
Those people that charge their cars regularly,
those that provide the service to the swarm,
they should get paid for the energy that they provide,
and it could be an invisible source of income for them.
But it's a mutual benefit for both of those groups.
And think of the biggest obstacle for electric cars these days:
it's the charging infrastructure;
it's building new power lines, relay stations, power outlets.
Charging cars on the move
will require less wall-side installations,
and it will eventually allow a smoother transition to cleaner cities.
The "we" is a powerful, powerful source of solutions,
and I think we shouldn't leave those to the bees only.
Thank you.
(Applause)