VISIONS OF MOBILITY.
Take a glimpse into the future with the help of five experts, who outline their ten-year vision for mobility.
We love to travel. To discover. Explore new roads. But today, we face a challenge. How can we continue to enjoy these beautiful, but vulnerable landscapes, more sustainably?
To meet this challenge BMW & National Parks UK have joined forces in a powerful 3-year partnership - The Recharge in Nature Project. Our shared aim and commitment is to enhance the electric car charging network and support vital nature restoration, biodiversity, sustainable tourism and wellbeing initiatives across all 15 National Parks, so we can help these extraordinary landscapes to thrive for generations to come.
There are fifteen stunning National Parks located across the UK. Visited 104 million times every year, The National Parks are vital, with 92% of those surveyed see the parks as important to personal health and wellbeing*.
Currently, many EV drivers worry that the Parks may not have enough public charging points. In fact, areas like the National Parks are sometimes referred to as ‘charging deserts’ - bereft of all, or most public charging options. We want to ease that anxiety and allay fears by adding charging stations near major routes and busy locations that currently have little or no support for electric vehicles.
Discover more about The Recharge Programme here.
In addition to ‘The Recharge Programme’, BMW UK are also working with National Parks UK to support locally delivered initiatives, which focus on vital nature restoration, biodiversity and wellbeing through ‘The Recharge in Nature Fund’. These initiatives, one in each National Park, will help the National Parks to progress faster and with greater impact in high priority areas.
Discover more about The Recharge in Nature Fund here.
To celebrate our first chargers being installed, award-winning travel filmmaker and photographer, Finn Beales has made a fully immersive film recorded in binaural sound, to help you experience the slow sounds of nature to its fullest. Enjoy the beauty of our most treasured landscapes as we join Finn on his slow, relaxing journey.
As well as supporting local community projects, at BMW, we recognise the environmental footprint of our industry and we are committed to reducing the impact of our vehicles throughout their entire lifecycle.
The classic lifecycle of a product is very linear. We take resources from the earth; make it, use it, and then dispose of it. The Circular Economy completely rethinks the manufacturing process. Our vision for the Circular Economy is based around four pillars; re:think, re:use. re:duce and re:cycle. That means approaching everything we create with circularity in mind, extending the value of our products for as long as possible, using fewer resources in our manufacturing and bringing products that have reached the end of their lifecycle, back into the production loop.
Electric mobility is among the major topics driving the ongoing transformation of the automotive industry and the BMW Group is continuing to electrify its model range as a key component of its product strategy. With our constantly expanding range of all-electric, battery-powered vehicles and plug-in hybrid models, we are serving a rapidly growing demand and the BMW Group aims to surpass ten million all-electric vehicles delivered to customers worldwide in total by 2030.
Also by 2030, the BMW Group has laid out measurable, science-based targets to reduce CO2 emissions (base year 2019). These include; an average of 80% carbon reduction at our own production sites and locations (scope 1 and 2 emissions including sites not allocated to production) per vehicle produced, C02 emissions during the vehicle’s use phase by an average of at least 50% per km driven (largely through the increase of electrified vehicles within our range), and an average of at least 20% carbon reduction in the supply chain per vehicle produced.
But we’re not stopping there. We’re continuing to use more sustainable materials, increasing our use of renewable energy, working to constantly improve vehicle design, and supporting our 70,000 suppliers to advance with us as part of the Carbon Disclosure Project.
* Taken from Amalgamated NPA Visitor Data, 2018 - supplied by the National Parks.
** BMW commissioned Jigsaw Research, an independent insight agency, to undertake a survey using research data from a nationally representative sample of 1014 car drivers in Great Britain. There was also an additional boost sample of 110 battery electric vehicle drivers, in order that this subgroup could be looked at separately with a greater degree of confidence. The research data was gathered via an online questionnaire, that ran during October 2022. Research was conducted for BMW by Jigsaw Research, an independent international strategic-insight agency with an exclusively senior team. Data integrity, validation and analysis were performed by Jigsaw Research. Data and outliers were validated in accordance with standard research industry rules, disciplines and best-practice approaches.
*** Based on research by the University of Derby's Nature Connectedness Research Group and experiences at National Trust sites, research conducted by Miles Richardson for the University of Derby shows that if you can connect a child aged up to 11 with the natural environment, they are more likely to exhibit sustainable behaviours later in life.