Advancing shared inclusive mobility:
How the ESPRIT Research project enabled the emergence of a new shared mobility system

The H2020 ESPRIT1 collaborative research project has enabled the emergence of a new shared
mobility system.

It consists in designing a small electric quadricycle (L6 or L7 category) that can be mechanically
nested to each other and driven grouply by a single driver (up to 10 vehicles jointly). This enables
to propose a new carsharing service offering a better quality of service, by enabling to deliver
cheaply vehicles upon request of a user, or by making possible to balance the fleet of vehicles
by resupplying empty carsharing stations in a cheap way. This system increases the capillarity
of the public transport in suburban or rural areas, and favours the usage of public transport by
offering a ‘last kilometer’ solution.

The consortium involving 15 partners developed six functional prototypes and a modal share
impact simulation tool Three major European cities (L’Hospitalet de Llobregat (Spain), Glasgow
(UK) and Lyon(France) have agreed to perform real city demonstrations.

A Following EIT Climate KIC project (DRIVE22) enabled 450 more users to confirm their
interest in this multimodal concept, and to showcase the system with cities and transport
operators.
The outcome of these projects has secured the feasibility of the system at an industrial scale,
and the financial sustainability of the proposed services on various studied suburban use
cases.
Following these projects, as a logical step, a startup company has been capitalized in 2024 in
order to bring the system to the market and to enable the realization of large scale deployments.
The project is an example of a project focusing on a practical ‘commuting’ problem the daily life
of the users.