Milan is Italy's most virtuous city when it comes to mobility. But how much do its citizens really know? While Debora Villa took to the city streets, we hit the track with Bosch. Here is what emerged.
Milan and mobility. The Area B scheme, recently introduced. Electric and hybrid vehicles as increasingly popular choices. The relationship between citizens and urban spaces. And the city, imagined twenty years from now. Remember? We discussed these topics not long ago in an interview with Marco Granelli, councillor for environment and mobility. Among the issues that emerged was the topic of electric mobility, which for Granelli is "just one of the possible solutions". A few months on, we return to the subject to gauge how much Milan residents know about more specific aspects of mobility. Debora Villa took to the city's streets to find out how much people know about different types of engine, the differences between a Euro 0 and a Euro 6, what CO2 and PM10 are, and electric, hybrid, petrol and diesel cars. And while there was no shortage of surprises, we, from the ACI track in Lainate, with Bosch took stock of the Rde (Real Driving Emission) type-approval tests — the ones that, since September 2017, have made emissions measurements more realistic.
In short, as emerged from the interviews conducted by Debora Villa, even in Italy's most virtuous city when it comes to mobility, when very specific topics relating to cars and pollutants are raised, significant gaps in knowledge come to light. While data from the 2nd Sustainable Milan Observatory show that for 97 per cent of Milan residents the priority is to "strengthen public transport so that citizens use their cars less", and for 61 per cent "funds should be devoted to developing cycle lanes", when faced with more demanding questions about cars and emissions, Milan residents struggle.
The issue of air quality linked to mobility remains one of the concerns weighing most heavily on citizens and institutions alike. The recent introduction of more stringent type-approval tests for cars is a decisive step. To understand how these tests are carried out and what results they yield, we went to Lainate, to the ACI track, where thanks to Bosch — one of the global leaders in the development of technologies and services dedicated to mobility — we were able to test a latest-generation diesel car fitted with the same instrumentation used for type approvals (Pems, Portable Emissions Measurement System), which measures pollutants emitted by cars under real-world conditions and in real time, on urban, extra-urban and motorway stretches. What is measured in this case includes, in addition to particulate matter, nitrogen oxide emission values as well. On the subject of emissions, "If diesel vehicles that are at least 15 years old were replaced with the latest-generation diesel models, we could cut CO2 emissions by 67 per cent, NOX by 90 and fine particles by 96 per cent," stressed the chief executive of Bosch Italy, Gerhard Dambach, on the sidelines of the recent 2019 Annual Financial Results Conference.
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Reducing vehicle emissions is just one piece in the broader picture of reducing pollutants across our planet, where the residential sector, industry and energy production from fossil fuels are among the main co-responsible parties. To this end, Bosch has developed urban air quality monitoring systems capable of sending the data collected to the cloud, where it is analysed and processed. This valuable data can, for example, through real-time traffic monitoring, adjust traffic light settings to ease congestion and improve air quality. Among the available technologies is also the ability to reliably forecast vehicle fleet emissions, based on the driving performance of individual vehicles, and then use this information to calculate and estimate air conditions.
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Diesel and petrol still have a long life ahead of them. This is Bosch's vision for the future of mobility — an authoritative voice, given that the German company supplies technology to many car manufacturers. A "possibilist" and "against the grain" vision, including on the future of diesel, which, according to the German company, may be far from facing extinction. While many carmakers have already pointed to electric as the definite future, implying the imminent end of internal combustion engines, not everyone agrees. BMW, despite having long been committed to electric mobility, believes diesel engines will still have a long life — at least twenty years, rising to thirty for petrol engines, as Klaus Froelich, board member for development, declared in Munich just a few days ago.
Air quality, especially in large cities, remains a fundamental issue to be resolved. Among the solutions are certainly electric mobility, together with various forms of sharing and micromobility, as well as more efficient public transport. Bosch, however, insists and for its part reiterates that it is capable of reducing diesel engine emissions still further and, in particular, of bringing nitrogen oxide levels down to zero. Evidence for this, the company argues, is a trial carried out in Stuttgart in 2018 which, by working on the efficiency of a diesel engine (fuel injection, turbocharger, catalytic converters and exhaust gas recirculation system), achieved nitrogen oxide emissions averaging 13 mg per kilometre — in other words, one tenth of the maximum limit set by the European Commission from 2020. All in all, the position held by Bosch on diesel — and by some manufacturers — is not an easy one to sustain, but from the perspective of a technological neutrality whose objective is to reduce the impact of mobility by every useful means and technology, it is an authoritative voice that deserves to be taken into account.