SEAT President Luca de Meo, and architect, engineer and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Senseable City Lab Carlo Ratti featured this evening in one of the Dialogue Sessions of the Smart City Expo World Congress programme. Under the heading “The future of urban mobility”, both discussed the challenges linked to urban mobility of the future in a context where the influence of the sharing economy culture is becoming more widespread in user consumption habits.
Luca de Meo and Carlo Ratti also addressed the prominence of the connected car in the context of a smart city, as well as the various solutions that, from such a perspective, can make personal mobility much easier.
According to SEAT President Luca de Meo, “Barcelona is the best city for researching new mobility solutions in the context of smart cities for its size, industrial network and the presence of startups that foster innovation. SEAT is participating in this and we want to be a key player in developing smart, new, urban mobility concepts. Our goal is to become a front- runner company in connectivity”.
SEAT is taking part at the Smart City Congress, which is being held in Barcelona from today until Thursday, with technological innovations such as the new Ateca Smart City Car with Smart City Connectivity, a pioneering project that makes it easy to find available parking and to share the car with other users. SEAT is making progress towards an easier concept of mobility, and this can be seen in the three displays at its stand: the Digital Sharing vision, the urban experience provided by the SEAT Ateca and the iCity collaborative platform, a system which partners the company with the Barcelona Council and Cellnex Telecom.
The Smart City Congress is an ideal backdrop to show the headway being made in SEAT’s vision of future mobility. The brand, which is undergoing a digital transformation process, is eager to become a leading brand in the field of connectivity and digitisation.
SEAT is the only company that designs, develops, manufactures and markets cars in Spain. A member of the Volkswagen Group, the multinational has its headquarters in Martorell (Barcelona), exporting more than 80% of its vehicles, and is present in over 75 countries. In 2015, SEAT’s turnover amounted to over 8.3 billion euros, the highest in its history, and the company achieved worldwide sales of more than 400,000 units for the first time since 2007.
SEAT Group employs more than 14,000 professionals at its three production centres – Barcelona, El Prat de Llobregat and Martorell, where it manufactures the highly successful Ibiza and Leon. Additionally, the company produces the Ateca and the Toledo in the Czech Republic, the Alhambra in Portugal and the Mii in Slovakia.
The multinational has a Technical Centre, which operates as a knowledge hub that brings together 1,000 engineers who are focussed on developing innovation for Spain’s largest industrial investor in R&D. SEAT already features the latest connectivity technology in its vehicle range and is currently engaged in the company’s global digitisation process to promote the mobility of the future.
