Sustainable Mobility Institute: a shared platform that has worked to co-build the future of mobility in the last five years

Renault, the Renault Foundation and ParisTech celebrated the fifth birthday of the Sustainable Mobility Institute on November 27th, 2014.

Renault, the Renault Foundation and ParisTech decided in 2009 to create a multi-disciplinary platform to co-lead research work on the future of transport and mobility solutions.

The aim of the platform is to carry out academic analysis and test innovative solutions while ensuring real-life outlets for innovations and their wide-scale rollout potential. The overarching goal is to meet the global challenges currently facing carmakers, including global warming, ecosystem re-organization adapted to electric mobility, growing urbanization and the corresponding traffic congestion problems, and the conditions for success for new mobility solutions.

By harnessing the skills of academia and operational players in mobility, the platform seeks to support and further understanding on the transition phase towards electric mobility and enlighten decision-making.

Collaborative work between Renault engineers and ParisTech professor/researchers and students was initiated primarily to:

foster research on the design of innovative mobility systems, particularly those based on electric vehicles;
train top-level managers and scientists with the skills required to address the needs of transport-sector manufacturers and the scientific and technological challenges involved in the long-term development of sustainable transport systems.

Over the years, the Sustainable Mobility Institute has opened up to other French and international academic and industrial partners seeking to contribute to the work.

The Sustainable Mobility Institute has over the last five years coordinated research programs and developed training in four main areas, involving ten ParisTech research laboratories and seven schools:

“Electric Mobility System”: to more fully understand the interactions between the mass circulation of electric vehicles, territories, the social and economic aspects of households in those territories, and infrastructure needs.
“Business model”: to gain more understanding on the economic and organizational issues of electric vehicles (EVs) for each player in the ecosystem on the basis of field tests, with a view to identifying the drivers that will speed their adoption.
“Global vision”: to objectively appraise the impact of new global and structural trends on Renault (environment, energy, raw materials and new industrial ecosystems) using strategic analysis tools and economic modelling.
“Technologies”: to carry out upstream work on disruptive technologies to further advances in battery technologies (increasing energy density to increase EV range) as well as work on reducing mass.