KUALA LUMPUR: Volvo Cars is teaming up with the city of Gothenburg, Sweden to make it a climate-neutral city by 2030.
The Gothenburg Green City Zone initiative, which starts this spring, aims to have Volvo establish a variety of climate-neutral transportation modes and a connected infrastructure for the city.
It is a shared goal between both Gothenburg and Volvo, which has continuously been trying to reduce its carbon footprint and be a climate-neutral company by 2040 – the company has since devised a number of objectives to be completed by 2025 to achieve this.
Volvo's objectives include a 40 per cent reduction of its CO2 footprint per car; global sales consisting of 50 per cent fully-electric cars, with the rest being hybrids; and a 25 per cent reduction of carbon emissions generated by the company's overall operations, including manufacturing and logistics.
"We want to use our knowledge and technology to help create a future city that is electrified, connected, shared and climate-neutral," said Volvo Cars chief technology officer Henrik Green.
"This is an opportunity to lead by example, by testing new technologies and services in a live large scale environment, we can show that if it is possible here, it is possible anywhere," he added.
According to Volvo, the main obstacle to climate transition is not a lack of climate-friendly and smart technologies, but the capacity to implement them as the transformation requires a holistic approach to foster innovation and a committed, continuous collaboration between all stakeholders.
They added that the collaboration with Gothenburg presents not only an opportunity to achieve their carbon neutral goals, but also the use of a real city as a testing ground will help accelerate the company's development of technologies and services in the areas of electrification, shared mobility, autonomous driving, connectivity and safety.
Part of the testbed plan includes running robotaxis operated by its fully-owned mobility provider M within the zone.
M, through its proprietary AI technology, is said to be able to reduce congestion and lower emissions in Gothenburg in 2020, with one car from M now replacing eight-privately owned cars in the city.
"Essentially, we initiate a project that intends to limit the number of cars in the city – which is fully in line with our company's purpose," said Volvo Cars chief executive officer Håkan Samuelsson.
"This is already proven by our investment in the shared mobility service M, which has developed proprietary A.I. technology to improve efficiency and utilisation. We want to be involved in creating the cities of the future and keep them liveable. This initiative gives us an opportunity to do that and take on responsibility in our own hometown at the same time."
Other examples of technologies to be tested include geo-enabling solutions and services ensuring that cars in the zone operate in electric-only mode and remain within speed limits, as well as traffic infrastructure that can connect to active safety features in cars and share information between road users.
The end result would be the creation of fully electric mobility hubs; a complete, easy-to-use charging network for electric cars; and autonomous taxis.