Dear Readers
Happy New Year! We hope that you had a white Christmas and a sparkly New Year Eve.
As 2013 has just started this month we decided to walk you through our achievements in 2012 and to give you a preview of where 2013 will take us. In 2012 the ERTICO team had quite a few trips abroad as several important projects ended; euroFOT and FREILOT had their final events in Brussels and Helmond while Viajeo organised conferences in all the test sites Athens Beijing Sao Paulo and Shanghai. But in 2012 Vienna was the ITS capital of the globe with 10000 people participating in the 19th ITS World Congress. Vienna was also the occasion to bid farewell to iCar Support; during the Congress Commissioner Neelie Kroes gave the iMobility Awards for 2012 to outstanding professionals.
This month we also conclude our series of international cooperation articles focusing on the United States of America. The story tells you more about cooperative systems very much in vogue these days and how the EU is cooperating with the USA in harmonising standards that grant a minimum of communication between devices built in the two different regions. In the article we also look at the research done on cooperative systems for safety and energy efficiency.
Finally this month we interviewed Jacob Bangsgaard Director General of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) Region I (Europe Middle East and Africa). We asked Mr Bangsgaard to tell us more about FIA current activities and to explain what the iMobility Challenge initiative is. Mr Bangsgaard also gave us some personal views on the work of the European Institutions on sustainability and safety.
We hope you will enjoy this first edition of the year and wish you a pleasant reading… and a very successful if icy start to 2013!
Link to original Article
http://www.ertico.com/editorial-january-201/
Original Publication Date: Mon 21 Jan 2013
