Israel to host Smart Mobility Summit next week

The Smart Mobility Summit will be attended by the prime minister and MKs of transportation and tech.

 Illustrative image of a smart car (photo credit: REUTERS/MICHAELA REHLE)
Illustrative image of a smart car
(photo credit: REUTERS/MICHAELA REHLE)

Israel’s Smart Mobility Summit 2021 will take place next week, November 8-9, in Tel Aviv.

The international event will be attended by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Transportation Minister Merav Michaeli, Energy Minister Karin Elharrar and Science and Technology Minister Orit Farkash-Hacohen.

The hybrid conference is expected to include about 5,000 participants, including senior figures from the smart transportation and automotive worlds, who are expected to arrive in dozens of delegations from about 60 countries across the globe.

The conference will deal with some of the most pressing issues in the automotive and smart transportation worlds, including electrification of vehicles, artificial intelligence and big data and its impact on the world of transportation, the transition to transportation as a service (MaaS) and more.

The event will also include an exhibition of start-ups, in which some 70 start-ups will physically enable the participants to view the technologies. The exhibition will also take place as part of a virtual platform that will allow participants from abroad to view the technologies and talk with the exhibitors.

Mobileye is set to open an extensive campus in Har Hotzvim (credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Mobileye is set to open an extensive campus in Har Hotzvim (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The event is led by the Smart Mobility Initiative from the Prime Minister’s Office in collaboration with the Science and Technology, Economy, Foreign Ministry and Keren Hayesod.

Among the speakers in the event will be Arkady Volozh, CEO and owner of Yandex; Prof. Amnon Shashua, president and CEO of Mobileye; Christian Senger, member of the Board of Management and Head of Autonomous Driving with Volkswagen; Hildegard Müller, president of the German Association of the Automotive Industry; Yossi Matias, Google VP and head of AI; Naoki Sugimoto, CEO of Honda Innovation; Yunseong Hwang, head of Innovation at Hyundai, and more.

“Israel is a pioneer and an international leader in entrepreneurship and smart transportation, with hundreds of companies and development hubs,” Michaeli said. “Still, in order to make technology the norm, we must actively work to assimilate the capabilities here in Israel, and not just export them. The Transportation Ministry is already making many collaborations with Israeli hi-tech companies, and we are now planning to step it up. I am happy to absorb the Smart Mobility Initiative and to combine the efforts in this area into a single strategy. In the upcoming session of the Knesset, we will enact a law that allows the performance of experiments in driverless autonomous vehicles, and support innovative pilot projects which our operations companies are leading – from experiments in advanced materials to traffic management systems and various ride-sharing projects.”