Introduction

1. FELIX RÜCKL 856xxx WCSO17
Running head: MOBILITY IN THE 21st CENTURY
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Mobility In The 21st Century:
Car Ownership in Germany – A Relic of The Past
Felix Rückl
Beuth University of Applied Sciences

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Introduction
Digitalization has reached every aspect of private and business life in the past decade.
Every business and branch has been affected by digital disruption, even if they have not
yet taken action to adapt to the new digital economy (Khare, Steward & Schatz, 2017).
There are products and services, which do not need to be altered in order to be
demanded; however, the customers’ expectations have changed and, therefore. all
companies have to understand the zeitgeist and find solutions to remain viable in the
upcoming years of competition (Berman, Marshall, & Leonelli, 2013).
This especially addresses mobility, since it is composed of four pieces: traffic, customs,
behaviours, and lifestyle -- all of which have changed dramatically in the past decade.
A key thing to remember is that experts assume we have already pumped up 40% of
earths oil resources by 2010, while oil production is getting more complicated and
therefore more expensive. This is problematic for our current concepts of mobility,
because 42% of the global oil consumption in 2016 was caused by road traffic.(Bukkold
& Feddern, p.7, 2015). This economical and environmental issue, as well as the evolved
demands of travellers in the digital era, can already be extrapolated to the global trend
that people are less likely to own and travel by car in the future. In a global study,
Meyer and Shaheen (2017) found that, “while population growth will continue to drive
the overall demand of travel and freight, … there are several countervailing
demographic, cultural, and economics trends that will likely dampen demand for vehicle
travel” (p.5).

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Similarly Berman, Marshall and Leonelli (2013) foresee a big disruption in the mobility
eco-system: “value will be tied to the utility gained from the entire mobility experience
and associated services, instead of the value inherent in the car itself which acts as
means of transportation” (p.11). Both of these findings show that car ownership will be
less prevalent and less important to the people in the future.
Moreover the car has lost its value as a status symbol to the young generation,
especially to those who live in big cities and are well connected with public
transportation. High costs of acquisition and maintenance are as deterring as permanent
traffic jams to the sophisticated citizen (Neumayer, 2017), and a variety of shared-
economy enterprises, like Uber, Car2go or DriveNow, help to fill the gaps that public
transport cannot close or when individual mobility is required.
The decline in car ownership will also be fuelled by a new concept called
Transportation-as-a-Service (TaaS), also known as Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS). It
may reasonably be described as the “Netflix of transportation” (Sahala, 2016). The
prime example of this idea is being implemented in Helsinki with its innovative transit
system, which is providing a real-time marketplace for customers to choose among
transport providers in real-time via App, to piece together either the fastest or cheapest
way of travel (Hietanen & Sahala, 2016). This concept will be explained later on in
detail.

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This paper will examine how the car industry in Germany has reacted to the new needs
of customers in the digital era, customers who have expectations about the travel social,
sustainable, environmental and ecological aspects of travel (Tully, 2012) and the
imperative to pull away from mineral resources and find new sources of energy and
ways to manage transportation in the 21st
century. Furthermore, it will compare these
actions or non-actions of the car corporations and the German Department of Transport
to the challenges of climate change and air pollution in German cities, to try and
identify a pattern of “disguise and deflect,” and to compare the findings to solutions and
ideas from other countries and enterprises.
In order to unveil new results, this paper assembles global data and research in new
combinations, focusing particularly on the German car industry and the change that it
has to go through to avoid excluding itself and to maintain the welfare of the German
economy.
It is worth noting that thousands of jobs are on the line, and that Germany is about to
fall significantly behind in the world economy ranking, as well as failing to achieve its
environmental goals. Big cities will not be places worth living anymore if managers and
decision makers in Germany continue to follow their current path: considering the car
industry as unsinkable, while steering into the iceberg of common sense in broad
daylight.
They need to understand that the course they set today has direct impact on prosperity in
Germany in the 21st
century, and finally to give up on individual car ownership as a
sustainable model for the future.

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The future of mobility will not get along without the car, but individual car ownership
has to become a relic of the past. Future transportation systems need to become
synergetic and combine different types of transportation adjustable to the needs of the
customer. The earlier German politicians and the German car industry start to accept
this fact, invest in different promising marketplaces, for example the E-bike market, and
expand infrastructure other than roads, the better off Germany will be in the 21st
century.

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Reference list
1) Khare, A., Steward, B. & Schatz R. (2017). Phantom Ex Machina: Digital
Disruption’s Role in Business Model Transformation. Cham, Springer
International Publishing AG. Retrieved from
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-319-44468-0.pdf
2) Berman, S., Marshall, A. & Leonelli N. (2013). Digital Reinvention: Preparing
for a different tomorrow. New York, IBM Global Services. Retrieved from
http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/gb/en/gbe03583usen/GBE03583US
EN.PDF
3) Bukold, S. & Fedden, J. (2015). Öl. Report 2016. Hamburg, Greenpeace e.V.
Retrieved from
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wissen.de/technik/verkehr/mobilitaet_von_morgen/index.html
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from https://forumvirium.fi/en/small-develops-mobility-as-a-service/
7) Hietanen, S. & Sahala, S. (2016). Mobility as a service: Can it even be better
than owning a car?. Forum Virium Helsinki. Retrieved from

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https://www.itscanada.ca/files/MaaS%20Canada%20by%20Sampo%20Hietanen
%20and%20Sami%20Sahala.pdf
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