CyberCars
Conducted in: 2001 – 2004
Most European cities face numerous challenges associated with the use of private vehicles. Problems include road congestion, energy expenditure, noise and pollution, all of which degrade the quality of urban life. Therefore, historical cities centers are facing severe problems, traditional commerce in them declines, moving to the periphery, and they become less attractive to tourists.
Technology has the potential to contribute to a sustainable development of our European cities with a new type of vehicle. These vehicles, which we call cybercars, are designed specifically for public use in cities and have fully autonomous driving capabilities in order to provide on-demand door-to-door service.
The main objective of the CyberCars Project is to accelerate the development and the diffusion of this novel transportation system by improving the performances and lowering the cost. For this, we bring together most of the European actors of this field, for testing and exchanging best practices and sharing some of the development work. A major part of the Project will be the development and testing of several key technologies for the enhancement of the existing systems.
These technologies concern better guidance, better collision avoidance, better energy management, better fleet management and the development of simple, standard and friendly user interfaces. Cooperative work is also needed at the European level in order to reach a consensus on the certification standards and procedures of these systems, which are now developed in a very imprecise regulatory framework.
CyberCars’ goal is to develop, test and certify key novel technologies for cybercar systems in order to offer a new efficient urban transport. The CyberCars Project is supported by the key action “Systems and Services for the Citizen” of the Information Society Technologies program of the European Commission. It is closely linked to the CyberMove Project, which looks at the introduction of cybercars in several European cities, with the aim to identify and overcome barriers such as technology confidence, habits and customs, landscape scenery, user-friendliness and regulations.