News

Europe’s automotive industry has joined forces with research institutions and other stakeholders to test and evaluate automated in-vehicle technologies in real traffic in eleven European countries, including cross-border driving. L3Pilot, a four-year project, kicks off today in Wolfsburg, Germany.

L3Pilot is a common European venture to evaluate the potential of 23 different features of self-driving cars, as well as investigating the drivers’, and drivers in surrounding vehicles, attitudes towards these cars. Helena Gellerman, project leader at SAFER explains:
“L3Pilot aims to demonstrate how self driving cars work in realistic environments, identify remaining technology gaps, affect different relevant policies, and raise awareness about the technologies potential to different stakeholders. The result, and the processes developed as a result of the project, will help support the introduction of self-driving on the market.

11 countries, 100 vehicles and 1000 drivers
The technologies being tested cover a wide range of driving situations, including parking, overtaking on highways, and driving through urban intersections. The functionality of the automated systems is exposed to the variable conditions of everyday traffic, with about 100 vehicles and 1,000 drivers taking their hands off the wheel so that they can perform secondary tasks.
"SAFER's key competence is analysis of naturalistic driving data and this is one of key tasks in this exciting project, says Marco Dozza, associate professor at Chalmers.
"Technology for automated driving has been developed with fast pace in the latest years, and validation of real-world driving is a necessary step for a safe and successful market introduction.L3Pilot will help understanding how humans interact and adapt to automation in the real-world, so that we can develop automated vehicles that are safe and accepted by all road users”, Marco concludes.

NOTE TO THE EDITOR
L3Pilot is an Innovation Action, co-funded by the European Union under the Horizon 2020 programme with the contract number 723051. 34 organisations have committed to scientifically test and assess the impact of automated driving systems on driver comfort, safety, and traffic efficiency as part of the project.
www.l3pilot.eu
https://twitter.com/_L3Pilot_

• Duration: 48 months, starting from 1 September 2017
• Total cost: €68 million
• EC contribution: €36 million
• Coordinator: Volkswagen AG

PARTNERS

• Automotive manufacturers: AUDI AG, BMW Group, Centro Ricerche Fiat SCPA, Daimler AG, Ford, Groupe PSA, Honda R&D Europe, Jaguar Land Rover, Opel Automobile GmbH, Renault, Toyota Motor Europe, Volkswagen AG, Volvo Car Corporation
• Suppliers: Autoliv, Delphi Deutschland GmbH, FEV GmbH
• Research: German Aerospace Center DLR; ika RWTH Aachen University; Institute of Communication and Computer Systems ICCS; SAFER at Chalmers; SNF - Centre for Applied Research at NHH; The Federal Highway Research Institute BASt; TNO - Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research; University of Genoa; University of Leeds; VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland; WMG, University of Warwick; Würzburg Institute for Traffic Sciences WIVW
• Authorities: The Netherlands Vehicle Authority RDW
• User Groups: Federation Internationale de l’Automobile FIA
• Insurers: AZT Automotive GmbH, Swiss Reinsurance Company
• SMEs: ADAS Management Consulting, European Center for Information and Communication Technologies EICT GmbH

CONTACT

SAFER project leader
Helena Gellerman
+46 31 772 10 95
helena.gellerman@chalmers.se

General press contact
European Center for Information and Communication Technologies - EICT
Sarah Metzner
+49 30 3670235143
Sarah.Metzner@eict.de

Coordinator
Volkswagen Group Research
Aria Etemad
Aria.Etemad@volkswagen.de