In the Groupforum at Autostadt

We are looking forward to a fascinating and multifaceted view of the future of private transport as well as the local, national, and global challenges it faces. In this gallery we will show you which exciting and futuristic exhibits will be waiting for you and which famous partners are supporting us with this exhibition.

University of Mondragón, Spain

Smart mobility in the year 2100

Today's Spain has the second longest high-speed train network in the world. It covers over 3,402 kilometers of track, on which the various super trains reach speeds of 250 km/h or more. With the national plan for adaption to climate change, Spain also wants to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. The University of Mondragon thus proposes the train as a structuring system for door-to-door mobility. The concept presented here offers a personalized experience by carrying autonomous hybrid vehicles that passengers access in an urban context. The „mothership“ train provides the axis for long-distance travel and offers a common space in its central structure, providing a place for social interaction and recreation. Key stops in the railway itinerary allow the capsule-like vehicles to take off and reach their individual destinations separately.

The University of Tokyo, Japan

Opening new spaces in the sustainable megacity

With 37.2 million inhabitants, the Tokyo metropolitan region is now home to almost 30 percent of Japan's population. The central urban area with its 9.6 million inhabitants forms the economic and cultural centre of Japan and at the same time the heart of the economically strongest region in the world. This project attempts to redesign the Tokyo Expressway, a road that was originally made to alleviate the congestion of cars during one of the country’s periods of rapid economic growth. The Expressway is now renovated as a high urban path and a monumental hill that affords an outing experience to city dwellers.

University of Cape Town, South Africa

Urban mobility prototypes for tomorrow’s Africa

The African Center for Cities at the University of Cape Town uses mobility design to address the extraordinary growth of the African urban environments of tomorrow. Their model, which is applicable to a variety of cities in the global South, presents a mono-vehicle prototype designed to optimize space and grant accessibility in a post-pandemic, commuter-centric, and equity-driven era. The individual U+ vehicle uses dynamic addition to become US+, thus responding to public mobility needs and encouraging multi-modal flexibility across many differentiated scales.

Tsinghua University, Shenzhen, China

Redesigning the Chinese megalopolis

With the reform policies of the 1970s and the establishment of a socialist market economy, a phase of continuous growth began in China that has continued to this day. In the course of these developments, the large cities experienced an unprecedented increase in population. In the near future, a megalopolis with 42 million inhabitants is to emerge from a merger of Shenzhen and eight other major cities in South China's Pearl River Delta. The Shenzhen Future Mobility Hub is already researching mobility solutions for the city of the day after tomorrow - including a future colonization of Mars.

Umeå University, Sweden

Expanding future mobility on land, water and air

The late 21st century will certainly be dominated by flexible, connected forms of mobility based on renewable energies. However, there are still many steps to be taken on the way there. While Sweden, for example, has 20 percent more land area than Germany, its population density is almost 90 percent lower at an estimated 25.7 inhabitants per square kilometer. With over 8,000 kilometres of coastline and more than 200,000 islands, the northern European country also has its own unique requirements for future transport systems. The Umeå University’s Institute of Design carries out a multiplicity of explorations around what responsible transportation design could be in the future. The strategic, speculative, and conceptual nature of these projects aim to trigger public discussion about what kinds of futures (and mobility forms) our society wants to have.

Hongik University, Seoul, South Korea

Inspiration in all areas of transportation

The South Korean capital Seoul forms the center of the Sudogwon metropolitan area, which is home to around 25.5 million inhabitants and thus about half of the country's population. While the metropolitan area of Sudogwon already has one of the most efficient local public transport networks in the world, Hongik University is developing concepts for making the means of transportation of the future even more efficient through digitization and connectivity.

ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, United States

The future lifestyle of major American cities, beyond the personal vehicle

In their draft of the future, the students present a Pasadena in which traffic is controlled with artificial intelligence and a variety of different means of transportation and mobility services, land and airborne, will replace the personal vehicle. The development of efficient transportation models creates new development opportunities for urban and sustainable city concepts. More space for parks and green spaces, emission-free mobility, and integrated technologies where the human takes centre stage.

Yale University, New Haven, United States

Will we live nomadically (again) in the future?

Human nomadism has a long history. At the beginning of mankind's long journey, we all lived as nomads (from the Ancient Greek nomás, »grazing«, »roaming«). It was only with the advent of agriculture about 12,000 years ago that people began to settle down. Today, more and more people are opting for a location-independent and technology-driven lifestyle that allows them to live with no permanent residence. The agency of the futureNOMAD is the central theme of Yale’s designed vessels and project, and wonders about our possible nomadic future. How could new forms of living together develop from these models?

Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Green mobility to define the future of urban planning and architecture

The Netherlands are regarded historically as a pioneering society in the fields of urban mobility and innovation. Concepts currently developed there by labs, tech hubs, and creative studios for green transportation and dwelling are setting precedents and becoming influential worldwide. While the Netherlands is currently experiencing a boom in electric mobility, students at the Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design at TU Delft think through the transformations in mobility one step further from the present time. Investigat ing what long-term effects new forms of transformation can have on the built environment, their film travels multiple everyday locations to explore how the future car will drive the needs of the new society.

Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico

How can we build social and environmental justice through mobility design?

Bridging between the United States and the rest of Latin America, Mexico has a special geostrategic location and an important function on the American continent. As the fifteenth largest economy in the world, the country fulfills an important task as a mediator between industrialized and developing economic worlds, and is a good example of extreme differences between large cities – including Greater Mexico City with almost 22 million people – and vast rural territories. Tackling spatial inequity and the role of mobility in the design of our societies, this project uses the automobile as a tool for proximity-based transportation systems.

Sustainable transport systems for rural regions

In 2021, around 81 percent of Spain's total population lived in cities. Due to a lack of direct connections, poor frequency and generally less flexibility, public transport services are hardly perceived as a real alternative to private transport for many residents of rural areas in Europe. The University of Navarra presents an autonomous, shared and sustainable rural mobility ecosystem, in order to build a network of connections with other urban centers. This ecosystem favors connected infrastructures that make communication easier, the implementation of autonomous vehicles powered by clean energies that reduce emissions and the evolution of shared services, eliminating a culture of vehicle ownership. This system has been conceived with the senior population and functionally diverse individuals specifically in mind.

ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Flight Assembled Architecture Revisited VR, 2023

Flight Assembled Architecture (FAA), a six-hundred-meter-high ideal pedestrian city for 30’000 inhabitants, was conceived by architects Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler as an interdisciplinary project with engineer Raffaello D’Andrea in 2012. The meta-structure would be erected, continuously reconfigured, and finally dismantled by autonomous flying drones. In 2022, Gramazio Kohler Research in collaboration with the Computer Vision and Learning Group presented at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao the former project by populating the vertical city with autonomous virtual humans, which are not merely animated but stroll around the city in real-time thanks to computer-generated avatars. In this new installation, especially conceived for Autostadt, they went one step further: in the adjacent room you will be able to experience life within the FAA tower in first person thanks to virtual reality. You will find yourself inside the FAA tower, while seeing the real-time generated avatars moving around you and through the spaces.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, United States

Superglobal or hyperlocal? Our future on the move

In the 21st century, we are confronted with several paradigm shifts at once: A global pandemic has severely restricted our mobility for several years, while at the same time global climate protection agreements are changing the way we look at the use of natural resources. So how and to what extent will we use mobility in the future? In an exercise of the radical imagination, the students at MIT Media Lab project two divergent mobility patterns, impacting our built environment, social relationships and habits of consumption.

Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Exploring future craftmanship in mobility design

Hardly any country shaped automotive design as strongly as Italy in the 20th century. You can find many of the famous classics of automotive design in our ZeitHaus exhibition DesignIKONEN here in the Autostadt. This design tradition is continued at Politecnico di Milano, where students have developed twelve different narratives that articulate through an interactive visualization that recalls the storefront of a traditional auto body shop. Each of the individual contributions deals with a specific challenge such as urban development or mobility as a prerequisite for social participation.

Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom

A look at the premium mobility of the future

Personal mobility is a highly valued asset. As our working and living environments are transformed by increasing digitalisation, our mobility needs are also changing. So which technologies, which product, service and ownership models will shape our mobility of tomorrow? These are the questions being researched at the London Intelligent Mobility Design Center in this exhibition. The presentation includes a series of scale prototypes and concepts that look at the long-term evolution of vehicles as part of reimagined sustainable systems. The principle of "use instead of own" is gradually leading to a different logic of travel, which in turn is giving rise to new business models – and autonomous and automated driving will make the traffic of the future smarter and safer.

Guggenheim Bilbao

The museum

Future of Motion was on display in a similar form as part of the 'Motion. Autos, Art, Architecture' exhibition at the renowned Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in 2022. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is part of an international constellation of museums, which allows it to access an extensive Permanent Collection comprised from all the works in the Guggenheim collections, including the Bilbao holdings. These works complement one another and, together, offer an in-depth, expanded view of modern and contemporary art. The Art Program is comprised from presentations from the Permanent Collection and a program of high quality special exhibitions, which offer our audiences a broad and dynamic panorama of the art of our time.

Norman Foster Foundation

The exhibition was designed by architectural icon and visionary Lord Norman Foster. The Norman Foster Foundation, based in Madrid, promotes interdisciplinary thinking and research to help new generations of architects, designers and urbanists anticipate the future. The Foundation believes in the importance of connecting architecture, design, technology and the arts to better serve society, and in the value of a holistic education that encourages experimentation through research and projects.