SUSTAINABLE MOVEMENT
Montreal’s Movin’ On event brings together ideas of how future rides will take shape
THREE-DAY SUMMIT EXPLORES THE FUTURE OF GETTING AROUND
MONTREAL — You can’t buy a wind-powered car, and probably won’t ever be able to, but there really is such a thing. And Canada currently holds the world championship for them.
That was just one of the surprises at Michelin Movin’ On, a three-day summit on sustainable mobility held at the end of May in Montreal. Originally called Challenge Bibendum — for Michelin’s tirethemed Bibendum mascot — it was first held in 1998 in France. The next 11 versions moved among different global cities, but after choosing Montreal last year, organizers decided to return for both this and next year’s event.
Attendees and presenters arrive from around the world. There are panel discussions, workshops, ride-and-drives, and lots of ideas and products, both from established companies and startups.
The wind-powered car was built by students at Ecole de technologie superieure and won last year’s Racing Aeolus, an annual event for experimental vehicles in The Netherlands.
“It’s all about the student challenge, not about making a car you could buy,” said Olivier De La Durantaye, who drove it in the competition. “There’s no energy storage. It’s like riding a bicycle, but the turbine pumps the wheels. If there’s no wind, it goes nowhere.” The car set a record for efficiency, hitting 18.5 km/h when the wind was blowing at 18 km/h, and also won innovation and design awards.
The odd little car sums up much of what Movin’ On is about. There are a lot of ideas and products, some consumer-ready and others that might never be. There are electric boats, bicycles made of reclaimed wood, and automotive wheels that are retreaded on a 3D printer when they wear down. There’s even a race car with artificial intelligence that makes its own decisions during a race, with no humans involved. But even the most outrageous concepts might lead to something that does break through.
Imagine someone at that first 1998 edition suggesting that, one day, you’d be able to summon a ride by tapping your phone, or use it to unlock a car-sharing vehicle. Still, Movin’ On also demonstrates that while most want to see mobility innovations appear overnight, they’re usually incremental, and often bogged down by cost or politics. By bringing together partners that include governments, private companies, activists and universities, ideas can be floated around and success stories shared.
For example, Daimler-Benz’s Car2Go car-share program recently pulled out of Toronto, claiming its free-floating program was hampered by city parking restrictions and complaints from residents who objected to the cars taking curbside spaces.
But in a panel discussion, Sandra Phillips, founder of car-share planning company Movmi in Vancouver — where Car2Go still operates — said that city worked to fit shortterm rentals in. “About 10 years ago, Vancouver had two car-share operators and about 10,000 members,” she said. “Now about 200,000 people use (car sharing). The city enables private companies to come in with special parking permits.”
The shared cars can park in Vancouver’s residential neighbourhoods, but not in the dense commercial cores where they would clog traffic. “There’s a lot of pushback, but you have political leadership that believes in it,” Phillips said. “Someone says, ‘This is my curb,’ but it’s someone else’s curb, too; they just don’t own a car. When (the city) got those complaints, they’d say, ‘It’s your neighbour who’s using that to get home,’ and people would understand.”
Not everything at the event is far off in the future. Quebec-based Lion Electric unveiled a new 30-passenger electric bus that features swappable battery packs, so a depleted bus can be back on the road in a few minutes. I was shuttled around the city in a Lion electric school bus; a New York school district just bought a fleet of them. Sweden’s Addmovement showed a high-tech electric wheelchair, and Quebec’s Innovative Vehicle Institute (IVI) plans to have its concept autonomous tractor ready for field trials next summer.
But R&D for new technology is very expensive, and small-volume production is pricey. The school buses are more than $450,000 each, and the handmade wheelchair around $21,000. And there’s often far more research than you might think. Francois Adam of IVI demonstrated a fully autonomous Volkswagen Golf co-developed with a German startup company, but the components can’t simply be moved around various vehicles. “They want to put it on different German platforms, but each manufacturer has its own proprietary controls for the steering and braking, so we have to develop for each,” he said.
Michelin, which announced at the event that its tires will contain 80 per cent recycled or reusable material by 2048, considers the summit a networking event, and all partners share its costs.
“It’s a platform not just for Michelin, but all people tackling mobility,” said Florent Menegaux, who will take the French tire company’s top spot next year when the current CEO retires.
“I’ve made contact with companies with interesting technologies, and with development, the costs will drop. This is the only worldwide summit that talks about mobility, and Canada is really trying to tackle the issue. The process led us here, and it’s because we think Canada is at the forefront of it.”