BCG—through our Center for Mobility Innovation—helps municipalities and organizations envision innovative mobility solutions and put them in motion.
The last great revolution in mobility was the invention of the internal combustion engine, which fueled Henry Ford’s monochromatic fleet of automobiles. Mobility today is a much more colorful, crowded, and complicated affair: new challenges and technologies are arising all the time within and beyond automotive—and they are paving the way for the next great revolution in mobility.
These emerging mobility technologies present tremendous potential for safety and accessibility improvements in urban mobility—but only if the public and private sectors work together to adopt them in a thoughtful and balanced way. For example, care must be taken to ensure that autonomous vehicles do not inadvertently intensify gridlock or cannibalize funding for public-sector transit.
BCG’s extensive resources—delivered by experts in our Center for Mobility Innovation—help our clients in the public and private sectors shape the future of mobility. We work to create frameworks for autonomous mobility and shared mobility, to transition to electric vehicles, and to conceptualize and deliver the infrastructure that makes mobility as a service (MaaS) possible. As a hub of cross-sector expertise, we bring the best of BCG’s automotive; infrastructure, cities, and transport; and public sector expertise to our clients.
Around the world, particularly in urban areas, travel is an issue. Among the urban mobility problems: Congestion leaves people stuck in traffic. Pollution levels climb. Traffic accidents and fatalities occur at high rates. And mobility options are not equitable—many people are not able to easily access jobs, education, or health care.
To solve these problems, the public and private sectors must work together to formulate a mobility strategy that integrates with a host of emerging mobility technologies, is customized to a locale, and accounts for such key factors as population density, public transport options, and street network type. The suite of opportunities and solutions BCG delivers follows what’s known as CASE logic:
C: Connected vehicles will account for 100% of the market by 2035. Automobile manufacturing is moving from a focus on hardware to one on software. This means that cars will operate more like smartphones, providing over-the-air connectivity, guidance, and upgradability and boosting productivity for travelers.
A: Autonomous cars will emerge in the next 15 years, with high-driving (level 4) automation featured on 10% of new cars sold in 2035. Self-driving cars and robotaxis—in the form of shared, autonomous, electric vehicles and autonomous mobility on demand—promise to help unlock discretionary income and overcome pollution, parking, and safety issues.
S: Shared mobility offerings will account for 15% of urban trips by 2035. Shared mobility includes ride-pooling and ride-hailing apps, car sharing, and micromobility with e-scooters and bicycles. It is most fully achieved by mobility as a service approaches and apps that allow users to plan, book, and pay for the best point-to-point travel across modes.
E: Electric vehicles will account for 35% of new car sales in 2035. Electrified vehicles (EVs) are gaining viability as solutions that tackle the pollution problem head on. Industry investments are expanding the range of EVs by boosting the power and reducing the cost of electric batteries and by improving the charging infrastructure and experience.
Bringing together these new approaches sets in motion a whole new paradigm for the mobility industry and unlocks a world of promising opportunities. For example, by enlisting BCG’s advanced analytics team to create a complex mobility simulation of more than 40 metropolitan areas worldwide—and through a one-year study we conducted jointly with the University of St. Gallen—we have detailed the significant gains that could be achieved by embracing autonomous vehicles, shared mobility, and micromobility.
In our mobility consulting work, we team with cities around the world to solve urban mobility problems. BCG also works with automotive clients and providers of emerging mobility technologies to help shape mobility solutions for people and goods, bring them to market, and embed them in cities’ mobility strategies. We deploy a variety of tools and simulations to help remake the future of mobility and to reenvision cities of the future. Among these tools are BCG’s:
Profit Pool Insights on Mobility and MaaS
BCG has a comprehensive view on the value pools across the mobility ecosystem. Our consumer and industry insights provide perspectives on the business model archetypes and winning ways to play in the future of mobility.
Urban Mobility Accelerator
This tool helps ideate and design mobility solutions that address city-specific frictions. The accelerator brings together local mobility stakeholders and city administrations to develop mobility solutions tailored to each city’s needs.
Economic and Maturity Assessment of Shared Autonomous Mobility
BCG taps data and simulations to create city archetypes and forecasts that predict the uptake and share of various modes of mobility within a city or region.
Market Forecasting and Infrastructure Analysis on the EV Battery and Charging Markets
We bring our detailed data and deep insight to help mobility providers and governments evaluate the implications of various battery demand scenarios on policy, regulation, implementation, and business models and strategy.
In BCG’s Center for Mobility Innovation, our mobility consulting experts cover all aspects of digitization and analytics to reach unique mobility solutions. The center’s expertise ecosystem includes startups, think tanks, and implementers. And our coverage spans intermodal platforms, cars reimagined through Industry 4.0, mobility services, public transport, logistics services, and smart infrastructure.
Our Center for Mobility Innovation works with leaders in the automotive, transportation and logistics, and mobility industries, including governments, new and incumbent mobility providers, investors, and other stakeholders. We’ve also modeled mobility scenarios in dozens of cities around the world and have worked one-on-one with many of these cities to put mobility solutions in place. A sampling of our work includes the following.
BCG’s Center for Mobility Innovation collaborated with Detroit and a conglomerate of local public and private stakeholders to help improve mobility in the city.
BCG is proud to partner with our clients and with other organizations seeking to advance mobility solutions. Among them:
We participate in the forum’s Global Autonomous and Urban Mobility Council, which seeks to shape the development and application of emerging mobility technologies for the benefit of humanity. BCG has partnered with the World Economic Forum on urban mobility since 2013.
BCG’s partnership with StreetLight focuses on helping cities prepare to adopt micromobility and autonomous mobility. Using StreetLight’s big-data resources, we develop strategies for deploying these new offerings at scale and design services around them.
Our joint study simulated transportation conditions across five urban archetypes, drawing on an extensive analysis of cities across the globe and modeling 1.7 billion trips. We interviewed more than 30 experts on the key success factors and roadblocks facing intermodal and autonomous mobility as well as micromobility.
In our mobility consulting work, we draw upon the expertise of BCG’s specialty businesses:
A resident-centric city can find innovative solutions to perennial problems and improve quality of life for the people who live there.
To avoid transport chaos, municipal planners first need to understand what consumers want from their transportation systems.
