Mobility has become a basic human demand making an efficient traffic system a prerequisite for modern society, economic growth, employment and prosperity.

The pivotal problem is undaunted growth in freight transportation and passenger traffic triggered by economic growth. The forecast of the German federal transport route plan operates on the assumption that disproportionate growth in longdistance transport will make passenger traffic shoot up by 20 per cent in the period from 1997 to 2015 while freight transported by all traffic carriers will spike by 60 per cent. Passenger traffic market shares will change in favor of road transport, paralleling simultaneous substantial growth in aviation. Market shares in freight transport will continue to shift in favor of road transport. The proportion of railroad transport will roughly level off while the relative share of inland waterway transportation will drop. Individual motorized transport and freight transport by road will continue to bear the main burden while the energy resources for transportation will become simultaneously scarcer parallel to the development of the global demand for mobility. Logically, this will make the limitations of expanding traffic infrastructure increasingly evident.

The following issues emerge for the future development of traffic:

• the global demand for cars and other means of transportation for passenger traffic and freight transport will continue to increase and they will increasingly be transformed into subsystems for attractive travel and transportation chains.
  
• Various means of transportation will be in competition with one another in terms of costs, comfort and safety, meaning that reductions in development and production processes will be necessary while individualizing means of transportation.
  
• The scarcity of energy and the limitations to expanding infrastructure will engender energy saving and intelligently organized overall traffic systems. 

Individual demands will be primarily geared towards driving down costs, augmenting comfort and safety while complying with social requirements like reducing the consumption of energy and resources, air pollution, noise, space and costs and guaranteeing greater safety, intermodality and intelligently organized mobility.

These individual demands and social requirements engender fields of research in transportation for a wide variety of technologies and the primary challenges in materials and components issues may be found in:

• cars/components
  
• safety and reliability
  
• reducing emission and keeping resource
  spending to a minimum
  
• component and system reliability 

Material technologies and systems, besides electronics, are poised to act as the drivers of innovation in the future in mobility/traffic centering around the technologies of safety, comfort, lightweight engineering and boosting the performance of power trains and chassis.