Two visions aimed at proposing solutions to the great challenge of mobility management. The President of Saba, Salvador Alemany, and the President and CEO of Seat and Cupra, Wayne Griffiths, gave a talk last Thursday in Barcelona as a closing event of the 28th Conference of the Catalan Association of Economists.

The dialogue between the two executives addressed topics of the future, transformation, and disruption. Approaches that focused on the same objective: mobility must be managed with a strategy based on ecology, but also on competitiveness, industrial development, and especially on dialogue.

Salvador Alemany, backed by the experience that a company like Saba has in mobility management in 180 cities in 9 countries, identified the need to implement measures that would not reduce the fluidity of the infrastructure and to make well-considered, consensual decisions that guarantee essential urban mobility for people.

In this conversation on the future of mobility, the electric vehicle emerged as a key player. Griffiths urged for fiscal measures to boost the sale of electric cars in Spain and asked for the subsidies to work since he believes the existing Moves III Plan was ineffective. The chief executive of Seat and Cupra cited the fiscal aid in Portugal, as an example, where 25% of the fleet is electrified compared to 10% in Spain, even though Portugal's car industry is significantly smaller than Spain's.

Overall, Salvador Alemany and Wayne Griffiths both agreed that electrification is the future for the automotive industry and mobility, and this will require efforts from the public and private sectors to accelerate decarbonisation and adapt infrastructures to facilitate its deployment.