4th High Level Meeting on the Connected and Automated Driving
Helsinki, Finland | 7 October 2020. The Finnish Ministry of Transport and Communications hosted the 4th High Level Meeting on the Connected and Automated Driving. The online event brought together Ministers and delegates from all around Europe to discuss three core themes elaborated by the Finnish Presidency:
- the need to develop and deploy transport automation in a human-centric manner.
- the need to enhance data sharing between the various stakeholders in the ecosystems of transport automation.
- the need to reform the regulatory landscape concerning transport automation.
The Member States participating in the High Level Meeting underlined how the introduction and integration of automation in transport can contribute significantly to the possibility of achieving larger societal goals (prevention of road casualties, the reduction of congestion in the cities and combating climate change) and should be seen as one key part of the uprising of new mobility ecosystems.
Recognizing that transparency is also a key from a safety point of view, and that it is needed to ensure the social acceptance of automated transport, Member States acknowledged the need of developing a vehicle/system behavior transparency of the algorithms so that the independent 3rd parties (like authorities and assessment bodies) can evaluate the systems and be ensured about the data security, assess the grounds on which the systems base their decisions, allowing a performance verification during the complete vehicle life-cycle.
During the meeting CITA President, Mr. G. Müller, stated: “In order to ensure the safe and secure operation of automated driving systems throughout the life cycle of the vehicle, these systems must be checked not only during type-approval, but also during vehicle operation. For this purpose, periodical vehicle inspection and a continuous analysis of vehicle safety data is appropriate. Only if these systems permanently comply with legal requirements do vehicles retain their high safety potential throughout their entire life cycle. This is the prerequisite for the society to accept and trust autonomous vehicles.”