Company cars powered by green energy

Future Fleet – the name says it all. As the first companies in Germany, SAP AG and MVV Energie AG are planning to convert part of their company car pools to electric vehicles. Up to 100 electric cars powered exclusively by electricity from renewable energy sources are to be used by the two companies within the Future Fleet project. To further enhance vehicle use efficiency, the pool will be managed using a company car pool management software prototype. This will facilitate investigations into the interaction between mobility needs, technical possibilities and new requirements in terms of the use of electro-mobility. To this end, the software takes account of numerous journey and vehicle parameters, including the distance and duration of the planned journey and vehicle range.

What’s more, Future Fleet should also provide fresh insights into user acceptance and changing traffic behaviour, as well as into the barriers and potential involved in exploiting electro-mobility at companies. These questions will be analysed scientifically by research partners at the University of Applied Sciences (HSMA) in Mannheim, the Institute for Social-Ecological Research (ISOE) and the Institute for Applied Ecology (Öko-Institut e.V.).

MVV Energie is designing, installing and operating the infrastructure necessary to charge the electric cars at SAP in Walldorf, Bensheim, Karlsruhe and St. Leon-Rot, as well as at MVV Energie in Mannheim. For this, the company is working closely with partners to develop new charging stations where the company cars can be "tanked up" with electricity generated exclusively from regenerative energy sources. All in all, this will facilitate mobility that is virtually free of carbon dioxide emissions. Use of the company cars will be managed via the research prototype of a car pool management solution developed by SAP.

With Future Fleet, the Rhine/Neckar metropolitan region is one of two regions to win the “Smart Grids, Renewable Energies and Electro-Mobility” competition organised by the Federal Ministry of the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety. Federal funds of around ten million euros are to be channelled into this project and into a second project in the Harz region by 2011. The project latches seamlessly onto the existing "E-Energy" beacon project, which MVV Energie is participating in with its "Model City Mannheim" research project.