 Good morning ladies and gentlemen to this the first ITU symposium on the future network car. I know many of you have been participating in similar events here in previous years at the Geneva Motor Show which were titled the fully network car but for 2014 we've revamped it as you can see it's a different program this time in particular we want to focus on the future that's why we've changed the name and also we have for the first morning two high level sessions bring in together key stakeholders from the industry and other players to discuss how we can all work together to bring the benefits of the intelligent transport systems to the citizens of the world and in particular to reduce the deaths and injuries on the roads today and there are many obstacles to be addressed which we hope to do so over these two days and let me first of all thank our partner in organizing this event the UN ECE the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe and particularly the director of the transport division Eva Molna for being with us this morning as many of you know UN ECE is the organization responsible for the primary international treaty relevant to this field the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic and I would also like to thank AB Inbev our sponsor for this event this year and that sponsorship has allowed us to have the event televised to bring it to a much wider audience than in previous years and also of course I'd like to thank Infinity Motor Company for being with us and for having this beautiful car here in front of us which has all the latest state of art technology in it and I'm sure we look forward to having a close look at that during the the coffee breaks and last but not least of course I would like to thank the Geneva International Motor Show for once again hosting this event at the one of the leading motor show events in the world I believe this is eight or nine years now we've been running this event so our aim over these two days is to finish tomorrow with some clear ideas on the way forward some concrete actions that we can take to set us on the right path for achieving the vision of the future network car there are incredible innovations which we will hear about in particular in the technical sessions starting after lunch and of course the opportunities for the automated driving and intelligent transport systems for the future many of you may be new to ITU and may not be aware that we now have a very clear objective to bring together the ICT sector players together with the transportation sector and last year every year we have a world telecommunications and information society day and last year we had the theme of ICTs and improving road safety we were very proud to have the Formula One driver Philippe Massa there demonstrating alive the dangers of texting whilst driving it's quite a frightening experience to see that we had three laureates honoured in recognition of their leadership and dedication to promoting ICTs as a means of improving road safety we had Mr Yuli Mauer president of the Swiss confederation Mr Volker Denner the chairman of the board of Bosch and Jean Todd president of the federal international association automobile federation so we were very pleased that John is with us again for this event thank you very much John for joining us and I'd like to mention that we're also moving forward in this area by having an event an interoperability event hosted at the Geneva headquarters of the ITU in in May we will bring together car manufacturers together with makers of hand-free terminals and phones to test their products against ITU standards to ensure that they do interoperate and they do meet the standards and we want to build on partnerships in this area key partnerships such as FIA, UNECE but also the very many other players in this area and in particular of course the car manufacturers car manufacturers don't have the tradition of working within ITU and so this is a challenge that we're facing is to to bring together the car manufacturers and the ICT companies to work together in addressing these these challenges it's been estimated that ITS could reduce road traffic accidents by as much as 80% and when we talk about the deaths on the road each year totaling 1.3 million and 20 to 50 million people being injured on the roads every year if you can reduce that by 80% then of course we're saving millions or thousands at least of lives every year and autonomous driving offers even greater potential to reduce these numbers so to try and bring together all the various players we have established in ITU what we call a collaboration on ITS communication standards and this is an open group open to any interested party we have many other standards bodies participating we have technology solution providers participating in the group and I'm pleased to say we're now seeing car manufacturers joining this group besides of course the benefits of reducing accidents and deaths on the road one of the themes that we've been looking at in previous events here is how intelligent transport systems can reduce traffic congestion and by doing so reduce pollution and therefore also help to combat climate change so there are two very important elements to this discussion we have today I'm pleased to say that the UN Secretary General has recognized the work we're doing in ITU and commended ITU for his work in this area we need to work with all players and we hope that this event this week will bring together all the key stakeholders we look forward to having some clear actions coming out of this tomorrow on how we can take the work forward I'd like to thank all the moderators and all the very expert speakers we have joining us for this event and I wish you all a very interesting and productive two days so I'll now hand over to Laura thank you thank you Malcolm thanks for all of you who are able to attend I'll start by just introducing our panelists as Malcolm mentioned we have Ava Malnar she's a director for the transport division of the UN economic commission for Europe obviously Malcolm Johnson director the telecommunications standards bureau at ITU we have Jean-Tan president of the FIA international federation of automobiles and Scott Ratz and the global vice president for global corporate affairs at AB in Bev Malcolm mentioned some of the statistics that I think help bring everyone together around a conversation about road safety and John I wonder if you would start our conversation by helping us appreciate why this is such an ascending issue in the global dialogue these days we're seeing staggering numbers we're seeing tremendous coverage in the popular press it'd be great to hear your perspective on the the urgency that you're seeing around the issue thank you for that and good evening everybody I'm delighted to be part of this panel to speak about connectivity road safety and to see how it can be addressed because as you rightly mentioned I mean road accident is one of the worst scores in our society and we feel it's not yet properly addressed as other scourges has been addressed like malaria HIV AIDS or tuberculosis and it's a big killer it was just mentioned 1.3 million people died on the road last year about 50 million people were injured and at the actual trend by 2020 it will be two million people will die on the roads and 80 million people will be injured so it's really time to act very strongly and I'm very delighted to have people like Eva like Scott like very strong minded people who have decided to address incidentally we're talking about the UN SG was decided the decade of action 2011 2020 with very strong aims and actions have to be undertaken at all the level as it has been on other scourges I mean we're in Geneva in Geneva you have the headquarter of UN heads where a lot have been done and a lot have been achieved and I really feel that it's mandate we have to lead that with other strong players like WHO which is also based in Geneva the word bank the regional banks and to have also commercial companies to join the movement to create a big structure in order to address properly the problem and then we can get into what other means you know it's education it's low enforcement it's road infrastructure and it's vehicles and here we're in the Geneva Motor Show where we see amazing vehicles amazing technologies but unfortunately everybody has no access to all those cars and to all those technologies thank you well Scott as representative from the private sector I wonder if you'd elaborate on Jean's point in terms of the role of the private sector in addition to the various UN agencies and policymakers on road safety thank you Laura and I'm very happy to be here at the Geneva Car Show with all of you and on behalf of ABM Bev we're dedicated to bringing people together for a better world and in doing that we need to address some of the key issues such as road safety in making the world a better place for all of us I'm trained as a public health physician at the world's largest brewer and when I joined this company I looked at the issues that are facing us in the world and Jean taught very well said HIV in the beginning of of UN age which wasn't here 30 years ago without a virus to tackle but what we have seen over the years and when you really look at the numbers that we've heard not only from Malcolm of the 1.3 million people if that numbers are right today and the eighth leading cause of death in the world which is lead to road safety to grow as Jean Todd said to maybe the fifth leading cause of death if we don't do anything about it it's clear that we need to have a multi-sectoral partnership to make a difference here and I'm very proud to be with the two leading UN agencies here today that are looking at this issue and what are some of the ways that we could help the world to actually deal with both the risks we have but also solutions the piece that's really troubling is it's not just deaths in large numbers but it's deaths in an early stage of life 15 to 29 year olds are the number one leading cause of death for 15 to 29 year olds is road safety so as a father with two boys that are just ready to enter that age group it's not just when they're behind the wheels of a car or a passenger in a car but it's when they're walking to school when they're riding a bus it's when they're riding a bike and hopefully at least not my children not on a motorbike but they're vulnerable road drivers vulnerable people at that age group so what we're trying to do with ABM Bev and we've been pleased that we've been able to support both strong sessions in Davos with Jean Todd and UN Secretary General's office number of leading companies the World Bank and others to look at the issue from a multi-sectoral standpoint and to begin to develop the kind of partnership that we think will be important in in addressing this and I'm proud to hear both the work that that Laura quickly mentioned with FSG it's been quite engaged in looking at the issue not only holistically from an epidemiological or number standpoint but also what are the solutions that we can find by having expert interviews by engaging with people such as many of you around the room here to try to come up with the solutions that we might need to address this gorge great and many of the solutions I think Malcolm you alluded to it would be great to hear for a few minutes how you come out in the net net of technology as a force for good in terms of safety but it's also been talked about as as a risk factor in and of its own self yes well that that is a very important point because I believe statistics show that around 80 percent of accidents are due to driver distraction and and that was recognized by the ITU two years ago when we adopted a resolution where ITU should take a specific action to reduce driver distraction because this driver distraction is mainly due to the use of phones whilst driving or even texting and this is why we had this demonstration by Philip Messer I mentioned and and so this is a primary aim is to recognize that in fact our technology is causing a lot of accidents and what we need to do is to make sure that we provide a very efficient effective and good quality hands-free environment in the car which is why we're we're very pleased to be organizing the first of these events in in May bringing together car manufacturers and also the the manufacturers of these products of phones and and devices for in-car entertainment etc to make sure that the driver can utilize all all these facilities without being distracted from driving the car so we're very very pleased about that the another as John Todd mentioned there is the decade of action 2011 to 2020 which the UN adopted with the aim of reducing deaths on the road by five million over the over that decade and another statistic which is is very interesting is that around 92 percent of these accidents occur in middle or low income countries so the developing world even though they have approximately only 50 percent of the cars on the roads so it's a very high proportion of the accidents are in the developing world and because the ITU being a UN agency the majority of our member states are developing countries and this is another reason why there's so much attention placed on this in the ITU and why we want to bring the benefits of this technology to all people especially in the developing countries to reduce these these terrible statistics but at the same time letting drivers benefit from the technology in a safe way and some of those technologies are quite exciting right autonomous driving and the networked cars they do present challenges to our regulatory frameworks and if i wonder if you could comment on how you're seeing regulatory agencies starting to grapple with this well challenges start with the fact that we have motorized road transportation motorized road transportation has introduced a lot of good things first of all it's introduced opportunities for people to be able to change their workplace more freely than in the past because the distance they can cover on a daily basis is bigger so it's more freedom it's more freedom and so to go to a theater and and and to meet your friends so motorized transport has a lot of positive impacts but there are a number of negative impacts safety is one of them i will not discuss the other negative impacts like congestion environmental pollution including noise etc let's talk about safety safety is one of the negative problems and ever since there has been a car even before it was motorized safety was an issue but with the increased speed and with the increased traffic it's becoming a real war to save lives in this war the very first perhaps big achievement was that soon after motor cars appeared on the streets some regulations were introduced and actually it was at that time fear that initiated and the predecessor of the un uh that was that and later on it was followed up so you had to introduce some order into the system but despite all all of these efforts i should say that safety has not improved too much over the years there are improvements in some parts of the world in the developed world there are improvements through technology in certain areas but the big picture is not improving global road safety is still a big challenge although in the past you know we had a very simple approach focus on prevention prevention means focus on vehicle infrastructure and the human factor and there were results the word bank had a very interesting study about the center european countries in the 90s who had to witness the motorization increase in a couple of years compared to the other countries in the west who had to have that in 30 40 years so the the recommendations were on these three pillars and the results were there and then we said it's not enough globally we have to have a more holistic approach very rightly and now what you see there is a very interesting correlation the countries that don't have proper regulatory framework for road safety are the worst performance with regard to safety so it's important to come back to these basics prevention prevention of course we need to have a post-crash approach we have to have trauma care improvement is very low in that area the health sector is not reforming itself enough at the right speed but we have problems with the insurance as well insurance companies are not giving the best service all over the world they are very good in the western in the high developed countries but not in the developing countries however regulations countries that have not signed up for example for the vienna conventions vienna convention road signs and signals and vienna convention on traffic signs countries that have not signed up for the weaker regulations of 58 and 98 they are the worst safety performance the regulatory framework with proper political will by the government is needed and you point out so many of the complexities which suggest that no one actor can fix this problem in any in any particular country and hence the importance of of all the partnerships that jontad was mentioning and jontad i want to give you a comment about some of the global frameworks that are helping organize these partnerships like the global road safety partnership and others that you're a part of to help illustrate how many actors are coming together to help manage some of that complexity i mean as it was said before the good thing is that the road safety situation starts to be addressed and i mean it's creating some more interest which is something which is absolutely essential and we have countries where huge progress have been made i mean we're in switzerland i mean it's a typical country where the number of accidents have decreased drastically over the last decades so in the developed countries and it's starting from a government decisions the problem has been addressed unfortunately as it was mentioned earlier in developing countries which does represent most of where the accidents are happening the problem has not yet been properly addressed and that's what we all need to do with every single means put together we must see how each government in the developing countries are going to address the problem of road safety and it is a society effort it's a global effort which has really to start scott what role do you think the private sector can help play in advancing these dialogues at the political level globally or at the country level well um you know john raises some really important issues of how we need multi sectoral engagement and when i hear malcolm's number that 80 percent of deaths and accidents are due to distractions we have to figure out and take up those distractions apart you know how many of them are due to texting or phone oriented how many are due to sleep deprivation over-the-counter drugs prescription drugs alcohol elicit drugs whatever it might be and start to take it down in ways that we can then figure out how do we communicate with those people as avis suggesting focusing on prevention focusing on things that can be done from the behavioral side but also at the same time prevention works when it's enforced when seatbelts were first introduced in these cars years ago they in and of themselves did not save lives passenger had to use the seatbelt they had to be reminded to use the seatbelt they had to be also reminded that there is a law to use the seatbelt and then they had to have enforcement that if they broke the law then you started to see the change and the curve went down similar innovations have also happened with airbags similar innovations of course with the way the car has the regulatory pieces and so forth but doing all of that doesn't just happen from a regulatory framework and then it changes people's behavior we have new ways of communicating with people that frankly are mostly private sector driven when you think about social media we wouldn't even use the term we didn't have the term maybe 20 30 years ago we had social networks but now we have ways that with facebook 1.2 billion people can be reached we have other ways that multimedia channels are there so what we've been trying to do is try to figure out ways that how do we get to people at times when they are making appropriate decisions and we sell beer people buy beer in sporting events we have changed the way they can buy beer in sporting events so they will not be able to get that and will not be intoxicated by the time he or she would get behind the wheel or we've also had alternatives that they would get free mass transit home or other mechanisms and so forth we've tried to instigate ideas of designated drivers but there's new things that could happen so I think that the answer is is that no one sector alone can do this it's it's too complex these days and working with the associations with FIA with others that have networks of people that understand the challenges but also understand all the different assets that we have together then I think we can actually begin to have the behavior change in the movement as we call it to bend the curve and I'm taking that from both an epidemiology standpoint right we want to bend the curve if we're going to this fifth leading cause of death we want to make it go downwards but we also need to straighten out the roads we have to figure out the ways of making the world a safer place that we all live in great I'm going to ask one more question before we open it up to the audience and Malcolm it's to you you mentioned the stats around the mix of road accidents in the developing world versus higher income countries you know we've seen the mobile phone as a technology to help many countries leapfrog kind of steps in development are there any technologies that you see on the horizon that might enable countries to leapfrog the steps in safety yes as you said mobile phones is really changed the way people live especially in the developing world in fact the growth in mobile phones in Africa is the highest and anywhere in the world and the reason that we've seen that growth in that technology and in the future technologies the new mobile systems coming along like LTE which offers a much better quality and coverage is the key to it is that we have a common use of spectrum if you don't have the common use of spectrum throughout the world you haven't got the economies of scale and this is obviously a challenge you know we have 193 member states in ITU come together every four years they have to agree on the use of the spectrum on a worldwide basis so that we can have commonly allocated and harmonized bands for these different technologies and that's quite a challenge to get all these countries to come together every four years and sign an international treaty at the end of that conference on how they're going to use that spectrum but it's been a very successful especially on the mobile phones but now we need to identify spectrum for intelligent transport systems for example in car radar to avoid for collision avoidance so these issues will be on the agenda for the next world radio conference next year and industry plays a big part in in driving these conferences and coming together and agreeing on the use of the spectrum because they're the main users so we would encourage also industry to participate in the preparations for this world conference and Scott says it's bringing all these different actors together I mean InBev it's really great that InBev is taking the you know this initiative to come together with FIA UNECE all the other players that will be participating in these two days and that's the real challenge is to bring all the players together and to collaborate together excellent well I've got many more questions but I know folks in the audience do as well so let's turn to the audience for a few questions I believe we have mics roving I would like to come back to the ambivalence of technology destruction on one side on one end and as Oleg said technology innovation and thanks to FIA by the way and the way FIA have been able to to test to demonstrate new technologies like mentioned safety belts but electronics have bring a lot of prevent not preventive passive safety with airbags with automotive operating systems moving to more active safeties with electronic stability control and now anti-collusion systems coming and of course the most important step is next one prevention and this is where we all hoped and for the past eight years Malcolm we have collaborated to your workshops because we have been convinced that technology could bring more in prevention now I have a question to Jean vis-a-vis in electronics you have been really making inaction the power of reducing pollution increasing the deficiency of the engine the powertrain and now moving to f1e I mean electric propulsion in the area of safety do you think that the amount of R&D being spent today towards the so-called autopilot autonomous car is really done wisely towards increasing the safety of the vehicle and they go to infrastructure or is it a kind of defocus versus you know accelerating integrated safety systems you know again ESP anti-collision avoidance systems and of course car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure communication further as Malcolm said more rapidly rather than you know dreaming at the autonomous car great so what's your position towards this start with that effort in technology I mean definitely over the last decade some amazing progress have been achieved and if I will take probably the most simple one which is a safety belt you know I mean safety belts 30 years ago nobody knew what was a safety belt and then when they started to know what it was they did not want to use it and now in developed countries I mean safety belt I mean nobody there to get into the car without putting the safety belt but that's in developed countries developing countries are far behind I mean developing country they don't know what is a safety belt yet you know so we must always bear in mind that we have two huge difference what is happening in developing countries where we have the development of new technologies which is fascinating I mean behind you have one car in the Geneva Motor Show I mean you have amazing cars with all those new technologies and I mean one of the latest new technology which you just mentioned was ESC electronic stability control I mean electronic stability water is just very strong drive ahead and in European countries it is mandatory so now you cannot buy a car without ESC maybe what you could you could regret that it's not enough information about it you know I think when you buy a car you should know what you have available in your car and unfortunately not often you have the awareness of your attention about what you have available and what it does make and you have sensational new technologies which are arriving and of course it's always a counter effect because it is true that all those new technologies like texting and all that and even using the GPS using the GPS which is amazing facilities to know where you are but I mean it diverts your attention you know so I mean GPS can be a killer if it is not properly monitored so on all those new technologies you need to have also a very specific attention but definitely you know in the in the best word with the new technologies which we are which will be available and if they are used properly definitely it will have one amazing effects on accident not only the people who drive their car or who drive their motorbike or the bicycle but also for all the people who are behind like the pedestrian you must not forget that 25 percent of the word accident on the road are pedestrians they have nothing to do you know with a with a vehicle but I mean they have a victim of the vehicles and definitely now you can easily allow a pedestrian to have access to new technologies so he will know when the car is arriving so all that is soon available but the difficult thing is how to optimize the use of all those new technologies great answer response as well one point on these vehicle technologies need to be matched with infrastructure technologies and infrastructure technologies are vastly lagging behind this area hasn't received adequate attention so maybe for us in the U.N. this is one of the areas where we are going to work much more because in the word form for regulations the vehicle technologies are addressed but for for the infrastructure we haven't done that in the parallel working group SC1 so that's coming up for us great great another question from the audience good morning good morning Bernard de Gerdit from fruits calcini connector I will speak in term of a standardization person in the standardization for the last five to ten years for ITS we done a lot of effort in ITUT, ISO, SI, ATRIPOLI, Etsy and for the standard vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure today the release one is finished we done a lot of interoperability there is a large project like corridor in germany between austria germany dutchland in france score f in u.s there is a lot of vehicle to vehicle deployment but if i look in the event we have a frequency 5.9 gigahertz but we don't see anything in the press people completely ignore this vehicle to vehicle and it's it's opposite because we have a special frequency at 5.9 and the the person say oh maybe we can use this frequency for wi-fi and not for ITS that means we have it in the opposite if i look what's happening the 3g 4g we already speak of 5g no people know what will be 5g but no people speak about 5g that means we need marketing effort in term of regulation because when we say oh people say no there is no business case but two million of person is a good business case great do anyone else with a with a question roger lonto with strategy analytics i'm curious if any of the speakers have some thoughts about the role that insurance companies can play because to your point regulatory authorities can apply mandates to try to drive adoption of these technologies but a market driven approach might be more successful i'm interested someone mentioned insurance companies earlier but then didn't say anything more and i thought maybe the insurance companies could play a bigger role great scott do you want to start with that one i'm smiling because when we were i mentioned the davos the world economic forum for this meeting that we had on on road safety uh the chairman of aig was at our session and before we even had the session he was speaking on bloomberg about the importance of a b m bav aig and a number of other companies including fia and the un to get together to address this issue and as the insurer who's doing a lot of training in particularly china and fleets and so forth aig was very interested in how they could play a role in our coalition that we're discussing the second piece is that not only the behavioral economics world but being giving using the idea of computerized chips to actually monitor the kind of behavior of the driver that then the insurers can give both a carrot and a stick approach has already gone into effect there's a number of different examples that are being used in united states south africa around the world to actually monitor on a very simple basis i think this is something that will work out quite well we've seen it we've actually worked with honda in brazil for our motor our motorcycles that are delivering beer that we're also making certain that these people are driving appropriately and also within the ways that try to reduce accidents there's all sorts of unique ways to think about technologies and partners such as insurers that obviously have a large amount of shall we say skin in the game in some countries and others where they're very highly mandated could very well be one of the key interlocutors and i'm really happy that that avar brought it up as an important partner and we're happy that we have the kind of engagement and the kind of thinking that's necessary to to reach people at the time of need i'm gonna close with one last question because we're almost out of time quick one for each of you if you had one wish to help improve road safety what would that wish be scott you want to start well i'm going first so you know i like to live in the world of innovation the world of when we go from what i say from the as a medical doctor who's been in academics where we always look at what are the best practices and then how do we scale those i think technology is making us move from best practices to next practices and when i was doing some innovation with the united nations of an innovation working group on women and children's health the piece that we locked on to the most uh was the idea of the mobile phone with five billion people having health within an arms reach with the mobile phone we think there's also the opportunity to say within arms reach or within uh whether they're walking as uh whether they're uh any type of transportation there's an opportunity for technology to make a difference in their lives and my vision my hope would be and we didn't we didn't have words such as google and facebook and uh designated driver even you know when i was first born uh we need to come up with something that's new that's something that links all of those things together and puts us in a framework where we have bent the curve we have made a difference and we have done this all together and make the society better for our children and our children's children so my vision is we will be there we'll be there with innovation technologies and enabler and all of us in this room are responsible for how we get there right eva one wish well one wish increase professionalism um but i would like to come back to insurance because that's extremely important number one if a crash happens we need to mitigate a negative impact one element is the health trauma care the other one is insurance in many countries insurance is not there so basic insurance is needed the other aspect what actually you have raised is much more about new technologies and you know we have a huge debate about liability uh we hear a lot that the driver should stay responsible no matter what technology is there now drivers may not create the demand for automation if they have to stay responsible so we have a huge issue that is a question of consistency between the vienna conventions and the vicar regulations we are addressing it but at a slow speed because uh we have to raise some uh some assistance some funding to do more research in this area so definitely this is a big task but wish not vision that's a different thing wish increase professionalism great uh shantad one wish i mean for me it's one clear wish you know we have the post 2015 sdg sustainable sustainable development goal and i really wish that the governments will decide the g20 will decide to include that among the priority for the future and without that it will not work very tangible and final remarks malcom one wish well my wish would be that the estimates of how much this technology can reduce deaths on the road the estimate of 80 percent is going to come true it's going to come true very quickly and uh i think uh we've heard how important it is that we have all the various stakeholders coming together and i think this event has shown that we're working quite successfully towards that end and that we can bring this technology to the benefits of all the people in the world and especially the developing world and we can raise the potential of this technology in the developing world where the majority of these deaths and injuries are occurring thank you for the the optimistic note to end on thank you again to all of the panelists and for the audience members for joining us this morning a great day