Springer Sustainable Automotive Technologies 2010: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference

Mobility is an essential part of our lives. The ability to move freely is central to meeting our social and economic needs. For this reason we have embraced the car over the past century perhaps more than any other technology or consumer pr- uct. Today there are around 900 million vehicles on the world`s roads with another 60,000,000 new vehicles produced each year worldwide. The scale of the auto- tive industry is significant and far reaching. For example, it is estimated that around two thirds of world`s oil output goes to transportation whereby road - hicles alone consume around 40% of the world`s rubber and 25% of the world`s glass, with the consumption of raw materials and other resources further growing due to the rapid development of the automotive sector in China, India, Thailand and Mexico. Transportation accounts for around 25% of greenhouse emissions worldwide, whereby 90% of transport related emissions come from road vehicles, predominantly cars. Clearly, current levels of consumption and emissions are - sustainable. This in turn suggests that mobility as we know it, based on the tra- tional vehicle technology and existing production and consumer practices, is - sustainable. The challenge of developing new sustainable approaches to mobility confronts industries and our societies in general. The concept of sustainable mobility is m- tidimensional and the challenge of achieving it is quite complex. From the Back Cover The book represents the proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Sustainability in Automotive Engineering. ICSAT2010 is the state-of-the-art conference in the field of new technologies for transportation. The book summarizes all important trends in sustainability of automotive development today with a special focus on materials, propulsion technologies as well as manufacturing issues. It provides a brief selection of papers and key-note speakers of the conference. Papers from the US, Australia, Europe and Asia are showing the lighthouse character of the conference, in a field which gains more and more importance as far as emissions and the lack of fossil fuels in the future are concerned. The book provides a very good overview of F&D activities at OEM’s as well as in leading universities and laboratories; the special focus is on new ideas for emissionless propulsions.