The Transport Concept of the Automotive Industry
Transport is both the precondition and reflection of our open society and of its economic system, with its division of labour. It gives people and goods mobility, without which growth, prosperity and also the social cohesion of family and friends would be inconceivable.
In all progressive industrial nations of the world, transport has been closely linked to the development of prosperity in the 20th century. The automobile took its place next to the train and rapidly became the most important of all means of transport, whether in North America, Europe or Japan. Everywhere, the emergence into mass motorization has been linked to growing income and prosperity for broad sections of the population. In Germany, the years of the economic miracle were strongly marked by the car. In Western Europe, the creation of the Common Market and of the European Union was linked to growing mobility and increased prosperity, which reached even the furthest outlying regions of the EU's outer states. The motor vehicle has therefore now become by far the most important means of transport everywhere in the European Union. More than 85% of personal transport movements within the Western European states are performed by car. The remaining 15% are shared between bus/coach and rail, with the more flexible bus and coach having the higher market share.
The commercial vehicle has also systematically expanded its leading role in the transport market of the Western European market economies. Its share of transport movements has risen from just over a half in 1980 to almost three quarters today. The market share of European railways fell during the same period from 19 to less than 13%. The leading role that road transport plays in all market economies and liberal societies is not the result of interventionist measures of transport policy. It is more the reflection of the desire of citizens for mobility and of the economy's transport requirements, articulated via the transport market. These needs are best met by the motor vehicle, which is flexible and can be universally used for a variety of applications. With the same dynamism, motor vehicle transport is currently developing as the motor for growth in the overall upward trend of the economies of the Eastern European states and in the growth regions of Latin America and South-East Asia.
Transport is never and nowhere an end in itself. Behind every journey there is a purpose. In personal transport, people travel to work, in business and professions, on their way to school or university or to the shops. They make visits in their free time or drive away in their car on holiday. As in personal transport, there are no unnecessary journeys in goods transport: commercial vehicles are constantly at the service of our production system based on the division of labour, for trade and for supplying goods to cities and villages or removing their waste materials.
Transport cannot therefore be forced back without damaging to these overlying economic and social functions.
However, transport must be organised in accordance with the aims of sustained development and must be brought into harmony with an intact environment. For the automotive industry, this requirement means that the mobility requirements of the economy and society must be met with minimum consumption of natural resources. This objective is best attained by means of an efficiency-oriented strategy, as already outlined by the German automotive industry in its reflections on an overall transport policy back in July 1990. In this document, the industry not only considers its own product, the automobile, but also looks beyond it, because the mobility requirements of citizens in the global knowledge society of the 21st century can only be optimally fulfilled by a networked and integrated overall transport system that optimally combines the specific advantages of road, rail, air and sea transport. Only the combination of different transport modes can bring the demands of transport and the environment into harmony. Road transport will continue to play the main role, because, as the guarantor of individual mobility, it will remain the dominant transport medium.
