Bosch piloted on-demand shuttles in Schwieberdingen
A proof of concept, designed to extend across the area: two vehicles and 31 virtual stops linking five zones over 65 km², from the Schwieberdingen gates to Ludwigsburg, Tamm and Kallenberg.
- Setting
- Five zones around Schwieberdingen and Ludwigsburg · 65.29 km²
- Service model
- Corporate shuttle, proof of concept
- Network
- 31 virtual stops · 2 vehicles
- Booking
- Same day or up to 14 days ahead
Results
From request to pickup, with steady use from 08:00 to 15:00.
Short in-vehicle times between gates, sites and transit nodes.
Average in-app rating in the first eight weeks, with riders asking for more vehicles.
The challenge
Cars for meetings, pool cars on loan, and sites the buses don’t reach
Around 6,700 people work across the sites. Many drove to work and then used the same car to get to meetings at other sites. Otherwise they borrowed a department pool car, collecting the keys from the secretariat. Bosch wanted fewer of those pool cars on its books.
Fixed feeder buses ran full between Schwieberdingen and Feuerbach, the two largest sites. The smaller ones — Kallenberg with around 300 staff, Tamm, Korntal, Möglingen — had poor connections, and that is where on-demand was tested first.
What we deployed
Virtual stops at gates and stations, with continuous re-planning
- 01Five zones, one service
Schwieberdingen gates, Tamm, Ludwigsburg, Kallenberg and Möglingen linked in a single on-demand network.
- 0231 virtual stops
At campus gates and public-transport nodes — no infrastructure built.
- 03Book ahead or same day
Up to 14 days in advance, with pickups held to a desired-time window.
- 04Continuous re-planning
Compatible trips grouped through the 09:00 and 12:00 peaks.
Five stops carried most of the demand
Five stops accounted for 81% of pickups: Schwieberdingen gates 1 and 2, Ludwigsburg, Kallenberg and Tamm. The busiest trips ran between gate 1 and Ludwigsburg, and between gate 1 and Kallenberg, in both directions. Dispatch re-planned continuously through the 09:00 and 12:00 peaks, and around 68% of pickups landed within ten minutes of the requested time.
How the assignment rules workOn site
Staff book in the app, picking from virtual stops at the gates and buildings. 
The Driver App shows the next stop, who is boarding and the route, updated as new bookings come in. 
Virtual stops at the gates: the van waits a few steps from the building door.
Nicole SusenburgerInnovation Strategy Manager, Bosch“Our work with Shotl in Schwieberdingen is part of Bosch’s approach to innovation: exploring new ideas alongside startups. Testing a flexible commuting service helps us understand how more sustainable mobility can benefit employees at a large site.”
Similar challenges
The problem isn’t specific to industrial campuses
What made Schwieberdingen hard is not the industry. It is a large site with several gates, a workforce arriving from a wide catchment on schedules that do not line up, and rail and bus nodes too far from the gates to walk — the conditions that leave a fixed shuttle running empty and push staff back into their cars.
Business parks, hospital estates, airports and university campuses all share them. Where the pattern holds, so does the model: one corner-to-corner zone, virtual stops at gates and stations, and pickups planned around the times people actually need to travel.
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