Exploring Driving Comfort and Vehicle Usability in Designing E-Cargo Bikes for Last Mile Delivery as Sustainable Urban Mobility Solutions

To address the sustainable urban mobility challenge, the European Union adopted a strategic approach that goes beyond replacing traditional vehicles with electric vehicles and instead proposes new mobility paradigms, focused on users’ needs and their multimodal, automated, and connected travel experience. The sector of light vehicles represents one of the most promising solutions due to lots of advantages: sustainable and healthy alternative to single occupancy car issues; unbeatable low energy requirements and consumption; higher social accessibility; space saving. Regarding the various urban mobility solutions, the need to design light 2–3 wheels vehicles for the last mile delivery, to increase safety and driveability by using new materials, sensors and vehicle connectivity systems stands out. This sector is a great opportunity for the development of new logistics models and the management of last mile goods traffic, that is constantly growing. Light 2–3 wheels vehicles offer flexibility and advantages for goods delivery solutions compared to conventional electrified vehicles and are a competitive solution in urban areas. In this context, within the Next Generation EU program, the National Cen-ter for Sustainable Mobility (MOST), Light and Active Mobility Spoke, has the objective of designing an innovative, ergonomics and safe e-cargo bike, consider-ing technical and infrastructural characteristics, and driver behaviors. The aim is to introduce a small fleet of e-cargo bikes for last mile delivery of mail and parcels in Italy. The paper presents the results of the activity carried out in the first year of three by the “Vehicle & User” WP.