On March 7 another pan-European workshop on Automation in Road Transport took place in Brussels. Europe is and has been very active in automated and autonomous cars with numerous projects having received large amounts of funding over the last 20 years.

Several projects have concluded in the last years, including SARTRE (road trains of networked cars) and CityMobil. Work has begun on CityMobil2 (no website yet) which will implement autonomous transportation system demonstrators in five European cities and which also will work on the legal aspects and industrial potential of this technology.

A key topic at the workshop was the 1968 Geneva Convention on Road Traffic which limits the adoption of autonomous cars because it specifies that a driver must be in control at all times (paragraphs 8.1,8.5 and 13.1). The US and Japan did not sign the convention and therefore may have a crucial head start in the adoption of this technology (we can already see this happening in California and Nevada).

More details about the workshop can be found here.