Yein Song

A mobility system centered on private car ownership has become increasingly resource demanding, space intensive, and environmentally unsustainable. Vehicles have long been designed around assumptions of a single primary owner, predictable use scenarios, and long-term personal use.

Advances in automated driving and digital platform-based mobility services have enabled shared and service-based mobility that provides access without ownership. Research and policy suggest this shift will unfold gradually toward 2050, with ownership-based and access-based mobility coexisting across different contexts and operational models.

In this research, post-ownership refers to a condition in which vehicles are no longer structured around a single, clearly defined user persona, but must accommodate multiple users, varied patterns of use, and different forms of operation. During this coexistence phase, vehicles are shaped by changing patterns of access, use, and management.

Current automotive design practices remain structured around ownership-based assumptions embedded in early-stage decisions such as vehicle architecture, packaging, and layout. Because these decisions are difficult to change later, they constrain how vehicles respond to emerging use conditions. As a result, new mobility models are often addressed through services and operations rather than vehicle design itself.

This creates a gap between mobility transition research and vehicle design decision-making. While transition studies identify changing user types, usage patterns, and operational models, limited work translates these conditions into design criteria.

This research addresses this gap by analysing ownership-oriented assumptions, identifying emerging mobility conditions, and translating them into criteria for packaging, spatial configuration, interface logic, and material strategies. The outcome is a design-oriented toolkit that links mobility scenarios to design decisions through scenario-specific criteria and guiding questions, supporting more accessible, safe, usable, and sustainable mobility systems toward 2050.