Automated Road Transport (ART) is seen as one of the key technologies and major technological advancements influencing and shaping our future mobility and quality of life. The ART technology encompasses passenger cars, public transport vehicles, and urban and interurban freight transport and also extends to the road, IT and telecommunication infrastructure needed to guarantee safe and efficient operations of the vehicles. In this framework, CARTRE is accelerating development and deployment of automated road transport by increasing market and policy certainties. CARTRE supports the development of clearer and more consistent policies of EU Member States in collaboration with industry players ensuring that ART systems and services are compatible on a EU level and are deployed in a coherent way across Europe. CARTRE includes a joint stakeholder’s forum in order to coordinate and harmonise ART approaches at European and international level. CARTRE creates a solid knowledge base of all European activities, supports current activities and structures research outcomes by enablers and thematic areas. CARTRE involves more than 60 organisations to consolidate the current industry and policy fragmentation surrounding the development of ART.

While Fully electric vehicles (EV) have zero tailpipe emissions and are seen as a key solution to meeting the European Fit-for-55 target of reducing CO2 levels in 2030 and climate-neutrality by 2050, much more can be potentially achieved if the global market uptake of innovative EVs is accelerated. The ZEV-UP project aims to address this urgent need by developing modular, cost-effective, and user-centric EVs for both passenger and goods transportation. Leveraging innovative design and engineering techniques, ZEV-UP vehicles will be tailored to meet the specific needs of users in both developed and emerging markets, ensuring high levels of user acceptance and market uptake. Key innovations include a base L7e BEV model that is designed respectful of affordability and can be upgraded and adapted for various purposes and needs, including commercial applications and higher-value passenger vehicles. By optimizing vehicle components for reduced material usage and enhanced structural properties, the project will achieve lighter vehicles with increased autonomy and minimized environmental impact. ZEV-UP will also develop digital-twin models to improve vehicle development efficiency and reduce validation costs, as well as designing charging capabilities compatible with a variety of regional power systems. Novel business and usage models, such as Battery as a Service, will be explored to maximize the benefits and impact of the L7e BEV platform. User-centric design, informed by market research and field interviews in both established and developing countries, will be a central focus of the project. Additionally, ZEV-UP will develop a proliferation model to assess policy intervention scenarios and strategize for short- and long-term BEV uptake in various markets. By delivering these key results and adhering to its objectives, ZEV-UP will accelerate the transition to sustainable urban mobility and contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in the transport sector.

5G adv. and 6G aim to expand the set of supported verticals and provide enhanced capabilities beyond connectivity. 5G CAM vertical services are a broad range of services in and around vehicles, including both safety-related and other services enabled or supported by 5G. 5GS has been built as a modular architecture to support any vertical running on top in a vertical-agnostic manner. However, it is realized that certain verticals (like CAM) have specific and strict requirements. Although significant progress has been made in supporting verticals, the corresponding necessary configuration of the network and end-devices is a time-consuming manual process that requires tight coordination at technical and business levels across the verticals, the vendors, the network operator, and even the end-users. This hinders not only the greater adoption of 5GS but also the uptake of novel CAM UCs and the modernization of existing ones that require a tighter integration with the underlying network. The main objective of ENVELOPE is to advance and open up the reference 5G adv. architecture, and also to transform it into a vertical-oriented with the necessary interfaces tailored to the CAM UCs that i) expose network capabilities to verticals, ii) provide vertical-information to the network; iii) enable verticals to dynamically request and modify certain network aspects in an open, transparent and easy to use, semi-automated way. ENVELOPE aims to deliver 3 large-scale B5G trial sites in Italy, Netherlands and Greece for CAM services and beyond, implementing functionalities tailored to the CAM services and advanced exposure capabilities. Although focused on the CAM vertical, the resulting developments will be reusable by any vertical. The ENVELOPE architecture will serve as an envelope that can cover, accommodate and support any type of vertical services. The applicability of ENVELOPE capabilities will be demonstrated via the project CAM UCs and via at least 9 open call projects.

The impact of road traffic on local air quality is a major policy concern and there have been numerous projects aiming at improving underlying vehicle and fuel technologies, traffic management and enforcement. MODALES will contribute to a substantial reduction in air pollution from all types of motorised road vehicles by encouraging the adoption of low-emission oriented driving behaviour and maintenance choice, improving the effectiveness of OBD devices and retrofits. The main goal of MODALES is to advance the fundamental understanding of the co-variability of user behaviour and vehicular emissions from powertrain, brakes and tyres, and modify user behaviour via dedicated training, including a driver assistance app and awareness campaigns, in order to support effective air quality plans and enforcement strategies to be developed by local and national authorities. MODALES proposes a user-centric approach to addressing all of the challenges which on the one hand enhance low-emission practices and on the other hand suppress high-emission behaviour by researching, developing and testing a number of innovative and complementary solutions in four key areas (namely, Driver, Retrofits, EOBD and Inspection) in order to substantially reduce vehicle emissions from 3 main sources (i.e. powertrain, brake wear and tyre wear). The results will be used as evidence with adequate quality to guide the derivation of effective driving practices and training courses for different user groups. MODALES echoes the EC ambition to open up global markets in transport services, through the creation of a worldwide platform for sharing and exchanging innovative solutions, experience and best practices for low-emission practices.

5G-MOBIX aims at executing CCAM trials along x-border and urban corridors using 5G core technological innovations to qualify the 5G infrastructure and evaluate its benefits in the CCAM context as well as defining deployment scenarios and identifying and responding to standardisation and spectrum gaps. 5G-MOBIX will first define the critical scenarios needing advanced connectivity provided by 5G, and the required features to enable those advanced CCAM use cases. The matching between the advanced CCAM use cases and the expected benefit of 5G will be tested during trials on 5G corridors in different EU countries as well as China and Korea. Those trials will allow running evaluation and impact assessments and defining also business impacts and cost/benefit analysis. As a result of these evaluations and also internation consultations with the public and industry stakeholders, 5G-MOBIX will propose views for new business opportunity for the 5G enabled CCAM and recommendations and options for the deployment. Also the 5G-MOBIX finding in term of technical requirements and operational conditions will allow to actively contribute to the standardisation and spectrum allocation activities. 5G-MOBIX will evaluate several CCAM use cases, advanced thanks to 5G next generation of Mobile Networks. Among the possible scenarios to be evaluated with the 5G technologies, 5G-MOBIX has raised the potential benefit of 5G with low reliable latency communication, enhanced mobile broadband, massive machine type communication and network slicing. Several automated mobility use cases are potential candidates to benefit and even more be enabled by the advanced features and performance of the 5G technologies, as for instance, but not limited to: cooperative overtake, highway lane merging, truck platooning, valet parking, urban environment driving, road user detection, vehicle remote control, see through, HD map update, media & entertainment.