LAUSR

Abstract Today, global challenges such as demographic changes (global population growth coupled with a growing middle class and its sufficient buying power), soaring urbanization and formation of megacities increasingly call for a worldwide environmental awareness. This needs to continuously unfold myriad potentials in new mobility concepts for industry and society, particularly against the background of a sweeping scarcity of resources and growing energy demands. Dealing with those issues, this contribution discusses current efforts on approaches to road mobility including its pitfalls and confusions in sustainability assessment, and finally initiates a visionary lightweight, efficient, application-oriented and need-adapted mobility concept supporting resource-saving aspects combined with alternative drive systems and modular design strategies. Picking up the keywords of efficiency, consistency and sufficiency as a basis for the prospectively rising importance of sustainable product development, the presented road mobility concept highlights a semi-automatic length adjustment as well as a pioneering lateral dock-ability of two equivalent vehicles either for a collaborative journey or for an individual short excursion.