ITS Monday: Edition 6, 2026

How Australia’s new fuel efficiency scheme quietly created a carbon currency for cars ‑ and it’s working

Professor Hussein Dia is a regular contributor to The Conversation, and here’s his latest piece. “Australia’s new fuel efficiency scheme has been in place for just seven months.

But the New Vehicle Efficiency Standard has already created a new, tradeable carbon currency applying just to cars and light commercial vehicles (utes and vans) market. In just months, the scheme has created a surplus of roughly 16 million “NVES unit” credits.”

Related iMOVE article:

• Alternative Fuelst: Info, Projects & Resources

Related iMOVE project:

• FACTS: A Framework for an Australian Clean Transport Strategy

High-speed rail needs to be delivered now – here’s why

“The Australasian Railway Association (ARA) has said now is the time to deliver high-speed rail, with national construction activity in the rail industry set to fall 35 per cent by 2031-2032.”

Establishing the Level of Support for Transport Initiatives which make a Positive Impact on Travel Behaviour

A new working paper from the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies, co-authoried by David Hensher, Edward Wei, John Nelson, Thiranjaya Kandanaarachchi, Corinne Mulley, Camila Balbontin, Wen Lui, and Chinh Ho. The abstract:

The concept of “windows of change” (WoC) highlights periods when established behaviours are unsettled and individuals are more open to alternatives.

This paper advances the understanding of sustainable transport policy by highlighting WoC and segmentation as complementary tools for designing and implementing effective interventions. Data is collected from over 4,000 respondents spread across Australia, Finland, New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and Sweden, investigating respondents’ WoC over the period 2023–2025. We also explore the influence of 50 transport-influencing initiatives on how people travel.

From a three class Latent Class Analysis model we labelled the classes as “Urban strivers” (characterised noticeably by a majority of members in full-time employment); “Settled simplifiers” (in addition to retirees, including homemakers and other “not working”); and “Dynamic jugglers” (including part-time and flexible workers). Dynamic jugglers are found to be the most receptive of the range of transport-influencing initiatives explored.

The comparative analysis of these three classes demonstrates how segmentation, when combined with WoC, can guide policymakers in tailoring transport interventions more effectively.

Dr Alex Kendall: Building Embodied Intelligence: Insights from Wayve’s Journey in Autonomous Driving

“Today, the world is captivated by cognitive AI applications such as large language models. But what will it take to bring the benefits of AI into the messy, diverse and safety-critical physical world? Robotics and autonomous systems must deal with open-ended environments, irreversible physical actions, and deployment economics that look very different from pure software.

In this talk, I will outline the frontier challenges and opportunities in embodying AI in the real world, drawing on our journey building Wayve. Originating from research on deep learning for scene understanding at the University of Cambridge, Wayve has spent the last decade developing Embodied Intelligence for autonomous driving. Our technology has been demonstrated across more than 500 cities in Europe, North America and Asia, and will soon be deployed with major automakers such as Nissan and fleet partners like Uber.

I will share the key technical ideas, system-level lessons, and open problems that must be solved to make Embodied AI a safe, scalable and economically viable reality.”

Related iMOVE articles:

• Autonomous Driving: Info, Projects & Resources
• Autonomous Driving Technology: Info, Projects & Resources

Related iMOVE projects:

• CAVs and the environment: A cleaner future?
• CAVs and Australians: Attitudes, perceptions, preferences
• Safely deploying automated vehicles on Australian roads