Tackling China's traffic problems

As China’s personal transport options rapidly develop and evolve, BMW is researching how the latest mobility innovations can be adapted and moulded to keep the BMW brand relevant in China, the world’s largest market. Chronic traffic congestion in China’s high-density megacities is restricting people from both buying cars and using them. This has forced automakers such as BMW to innovate. “Growth in the future won’t come from building and selling cars but from other services,” said Thiemo Schalk, who manages BMW’s Centre of Urban Mobility Competence in Berlin. BMW recently launched its ReachNow car-sharing scheme in the city of Chengdu, starting with a fleet of 100 i3 electric cars as the company investigates whether to expand the service to other Chinese cities. BMW, however, knows that it needs additional mobility solutions in China so it has asked its advanced research department in Shanghai for help. The team, which works in an office tucked away in the leafy streets of the city’s old French Concession district, has been asked to take BMW into areas where no car company has ventured before. BMW is aiming to make carpooling more attractive. “The perception right now is that carpooling is low cost. We’re trying to make it more premium,” said the head of BMW’s advanced research department in Shanghai, Markus Seidel. The project involves mining customers’ phones for GPS data to establish their daily travel patterns, encrypting that data and sending it out to try and match it with others. The second step is to treat the data the same way that a dating app would so that participants are matched with people who share similar interests. Ride-hailing is another technology that is growing fast. China’s answer to Uber, Didi Chuxing, now achieves an astonishing 25 million rides a day in the country, according to Didi’s data. Furthermore, Seidel and his team are working to figure out what premium customers of future BMW autonomous robo-taxis or personal cars might want. His vision incorporates elements of an airplane’s business-class cabin, complete with automated flight attendants. What that means is the car could be designed to serve passengers, such as making coffee using a robot arm that responds to voice commands.