The micromobility real lab was launched at DHBW Stuttgart in October. Until February 2021, students, staff and lecturers can borrow e-scooters free of charge at the Jägerstraße, Herdweg, Paulinenstraße, Rotebühlstraße and Tübinger Straße locations and park them there again. The aim of the project is to research the acceptance and usage experience of location-based micromobility concepts.
Only rarely does a research project become as visible in public space as the DHBW Drive real lab. Since October, e-scooters have been parked at almost all DHBW Stuttgart locations. E-scooters with the DHBW logo can also be found from time to time between the locations and in the city. They are part of the DHBW Drive research project, which is currently enjoying great popularity among students and staff. In the first two weeks, more than 1,000 users (926 of them students) registered for the project via app and drove more than 3,300 kilometers.
DHBW Drive is backed by the DHBW Stuttgart’s micromobility real laboratory, which is run by the Center for Empirical Research (ZEF) and the Center for Vehicle Development and Sustainable Mobility (ZFM). The scooters are provided by MiMo UG and EAR Innovation Hub, which intend to use the cooperative research project for business model development. Within DHBW Stuttgart, the data will be evaluated pseudonymously in an integration seminar by students of the Business Administration-Industry course. In addition, the data will be analyzed as part of a doctoral project on “Shared Mobility”.
The scientific directors Prof. Dr. Marc Kuhn and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Harald Mandel are particularly proud of the innovative power of the model. “Public institutions such as hospitals, city administrations or universities are often spread over an entire urban area. In many district towns here, there is a lack of modern mobility services to connect these locations. In our research, we now want to find out whether micromobility offerings help to reduce the ‘perceived’ distances between locations, how they are used by users in everyday life, and what the user experience ultimately looks like,” says Prof. Dr. Marc Kuhn from the Faculty of Business.
For Prof. Dr.-Ing. Harald Mandel from the Faculty of Engineering, the focus is on the technical aspect: “Thanks to the real lab, we have the opportunity to test the operational stability of the e-scooters in practice and over the long term. How do the loads of everyday operation affect the e-scooters? Where do they exhibit weaknesses? Sustainability in terms of holistic balance can also be determined in this laboratory. For example, the e-scooters consume about 10% of their charging capacity per day through tracking. We want to explore this share of add-on energy in the project.”
The DHBW project team also includes project managers Daniel Grühn and David Ramert, PhD student Maximilian Schwing, and data expert Gabriel Yuras.
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