With four million people dying annually due to outdoor pollution, improvement of air quality has become one of society’s main challenges. In Europe, traffic and transport have a large effect on air quality, specifically passenger cars and commercial vehicles and to a lesser extent non-road mobile machinery. While technical improvements and more stringent legislation have had a significant impact, traffic and transport emissions are still too high and air quality is still poor. Although the use of electric and other zero-emission propulsion technologies may drastically reduce the pollutant exhaust emissions from traffic, the slow introduction of such vehicles as well as the trend of increasing vehicle lifetimes means that vehicles with internal combustion engines are expected to dominate the fleet beyond 2030. This project is the first opportunity to improve emissions of vehicles, not by improving vehicle technology, but by actively involving vehicle users and enabling their contribution to clean driving.
The overall aim of uCARe is to reduce the overall pollutant emissions of the existing combustion engine vehicle fleet by providing vehicle users with simple and effective tools to decrease their individual emissions and to support stakeholders with an interest in local air quality in selecting feasible intervention strategies that lead to the desired user behaviour.