BMW 2008 Annual Report Download - page 190

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not always available at peak times. But if, in the future,
you could hook up a large number of electric cars to
battery-charging stations for recharging at night, the fleet
of E-
vehicles would work as a kind of gigantic, networked
battery.
Electric vehicles would store the green energy as
soon as it was generated – helping to solve one of the
central problems of regenerative power generation and
meeting the challenges of urban mobility at the same time.
For now, those remain visions of the future. “But we are
making such tremendous progress on completely new
concepts for vehicles with electric drives within such a short
space of time,” Kolling points out, “that we don’t even
know what else is possible yet!” A lot of questions still need
to be answered – but that is precisely what project i is all
about.
But what does such a vehicle need to be able to do?
What could it potentially do without? What does mobility
mean for people in megacities? These are the questions
project i market researchers put to dozens of traffic plan-
ners, architects, environmentalists and creative types from
all over the world at the very outset of the project. They
travelled round the globe twice to interview people in Lon-
don and Paris, Los Angeles, Mexico City and Shanghai.
“Many of them,” Kolling recalls, “were totally surprised how
openly we listened to what they had to say. And they are
now very keen to see what kind of solutions we will be able
to offer them.”
However, the key question is one the project team has
asked itself again and again, in every phase of the project.
And it is still heard every day in the office at the heart of
the BMW plant in Munich. The question is: “Which of our
customers’ problems does this solve?”
Every aspect of project i developments is measured against
this pivotal question. “Need-Offer-Fit” is what designer
Kolling calls this approach. It simply means that every prod-
uct and the services that go with it have to be developed
in ongoing dialogue with future users. This approach sub-
stantially improves its chances of success. “We want this
discussion to be as long and as intensive as possible,” says
Kolling, “because our future customers’ needs are chang-
ing just as dramatically as the cities themselves: We will
keep on adjusting and improving our vehicle concepts right
up until production starts.”
The first project i vehicles will roll off the assembly line
be-
fore the middle of the next decade. Until then, there is
plenty of time for all those questions. And plenty of scope
for unconventional answers: answers which are sure to
get – and keep – tomorrow’s urbanites on the move.
Spring 2010
Evaluation of
MINI E field trial
Challenge: Shanghai Inhabitants in the urban area: . million
Inhabitants per square kilometre: , Inhabitants by : . million
The challenge of the future Topic one Future project i