• Cities benefit from smart cars if they create interfaces
  • Definitions give urban planners easier access to future technologies
  • DIN specification 91340 defines 205 key terms in urban mobility
Traffic in Munich
Mittlerer Ring and Olympiapark

Audi has founded a working group together with city governments, business and scientific institutions, and produced with its partners a catalogue of terms for the city of the future. A DIN specification precisely defines more than 200 terms in automobile technology for “intelligent individual urban mobility.“ This is necessary to guarantee that urban planners can take account of impulses coming from interdisciplinary research and development while they design the smart city of tomorrow. Audi is convinced that cities will benefit from intelligent automobiles if they create the interfaces to match.

What is “driverless driving?” What is meant by “intelligent infrastructure?” What exactly does “piloted parking” look like? Seamless and sustainable mobility in cities is the aim of all urban planners. This is why DIN specification 91340 clarifies what we mean by “Car sharing,” “Ride hailing” or “Fleet services.” There will be “Drop-off areas” where drivers can leave their cars, before they park themselves without a driver.

In cities “Hubs” will be the places to change from one mode of transportation to another. A city is defined as “smart” when it is “skilled in handling problems and finding solutions.“ And a car is characterized as “intelligent” when it is “a system that is automated to a very large degree and that has comprehensive input variables and a complex control logic.” The car of the future thus fits perfectly into the traffic concepts of the digitally networked city.

In addition to the Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN; German Standards Institute), representatives of the fields of research (ETH Zurich), city government (Düsseldorf, Erfurt, Hamburg, Munich), industry (VW Commercial Vehicles), the Association of the German Automobile Industry (VDA) and city-linked organizations are taking part in this Audi initiative. DIN SPEC 91340 is addressed to everybody who is involved with urban mobility and therefore aims to have new models of cooperation. The official publication “DIN SPEC 91340 – Terminology of intelligent individual urban mobility” can be ordered from the publisher Beuth Verlag.