More than 30 start-ups from all over the world are presenting their ideas for future mobility online as part of the eighth Expo Days.

CarbonBlock – a sustainability project by the Berlin start-up CircularTree – has also won the Global Innovation Award of the American accelerator Plug and Play. Porsche set up this project as a pilot together with the suppliers BASF and Motherson. The blockchain application developed by CarbonBlock makes the greenhouse emissions of supply chains transparent. It provides companies with “smart contracts”, which make it possible to digitally forward the CO₂ emissions of components along the supply chain, in order to quantify a product’s carbon footprint in a standardised way.

The other projects with Porsche participation in the eighth round

Circularise tracks plastics from raw material through to finished car

Porsche has developed a prototype app together with the Dutch start-up Circularise and the suppliers Covestro, Domo Chemicals and Borealis. The app uses blockchain technology to make information about the sustainable production of components and materials visible to customers. It does this by enabling the individual plastic content of product parts to be tracked.

ClimaCell extends Porsche Roads app to include real-time air quality

US start-up ClimaCell has further developed the ROADS by Porsche app so that detailed information on air quality is now available in real time. ClimaCell has based this on a “weather of things” approach and uses several hundred million virtual sensors. These include satellite signals as well as data collected using Car-to-X technology, traffic monitoring cameras or mobile devices. A traffic light system informs drivers about the air quality on their route.

Monk pioneers lightning-fast inspections by smartphone

A project from the French start-up Monk, supported by Porsche, speeds up the return and assessment of rental cars and lease vehicles. Monk has developed a software application that allows fast analysis of possible damage on these vehicles. Using a smartphone, the user takes photos so that the scope of potential damage to different areas of the car can be analysed by artificial intelligence.

Clear and precise speech recognition: Hi.Auto cuts out background noise

Together with Porsche, the Israeli start-up Hi.Auto has developed an audiovisual speech recognition system. The user speaks in the normal way via a microphone, while a camera simultaneously observes lip movements. This information is evaluated by means of a deep learning algorithm and enables speech and background noise to be separated more clearly than with previous purely audio-based methods.

About Startup Autobahn

Porsche has been a partner of Startup Autobahn since the beginning of 2017. The innovation platform acts as an interface between industry-leading companies and technology start-ups in Stuttgart. The programme enables corporate partners and start-ups to jointly develop prototypes to evaluate possible further collaborations between the two parties, and to test the technology and initiate production-ready implementation. The projects are set up to run for a period of six months and a number of companies have joined the platform. Alongside Porsche, these include Daimler, the University of Stuttgart, Arena 2036, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, DXC Technology, ZF Friedrichshafen and BASF. So far, Porsche has realised more than 70 projects with Startup Autobahn. Around a third of the results are incorporated in series development.