The 4^th Drive2theFuture Plenary meeting took place on 7^th & 8^th October. It was the first project plenary meeting to be held online due to travelling restrictions due to COVID-19. The meeting has successfully summarised the so far achievements of the project, as it reached its mid-term. Preparations for the midterm review were arranged and the next steps for the second project period discussed among the project partners.

Drive2theFuture consortium partner Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB-MOBI) organized between June 2020 and October 2020, 4 European interactive online stakeholder workshops, to assess the stakeholders’ opinions on future autonomous mobility and logistics scenarios. The workshops were organized in collaboration with the consortium partners Wiener Linien (Austria), UNIZA (Slovakia), Vedecom (France) and PZM (Poland). In total, 63 experts participated.
The aim of the stakeholder workshops was to perform a broad societal impact assessment. Autonomous vehicle scenarios were defined to match the project’s pilot sites implementations in a broader sense or represent future implementations of the pilot. By using the Multi-Actor Multi-Criteria Analysis (MAMCA) online tool and group discussions, this led to an in-depth understanding of stakeholder objectives. Overall, the results show that stakeholders expect automated scenarios to be an improvement compared to the business as usual. In general, higher positive impacts are expected for shared automated services compared to privately-owned automated cars. Furthermore, a high importance is given to the safety and security impact area.
More details on the workshops and their results can be found in D6.1 Impact assessment framework, project KPIs and their prioritisation.

As part of their Drive2theFuture commitments, IAM RoadSmart is conducting a survey of driver trainers to understand their feelings towards more autonomous vehicles. The survey remains still open until the 14^th of February to reach a higher number of contributions. We already have 1.158 responses, but we are looking for more answers, to gain a more representative view from across Europe and, thus, help us understand the position of the Driver Training industry. The link to the survey is https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/BCKBZZK

The purpose of the Voice of Customers’ survey that was designed and developed by CERTH/HIT and FIA with the contribution of all Drive2theFuture partners, has been to explore the opinions of all transport users about acceptance of Autonomous Vehicles for different transport modes, respecting a good balance of gender, geographical coverage, transport modes and user clusters. The survey took special interest in ensuring the necessary representation of all transport modes, in order to include the proper description of automation levels of each mode, while covering their different needs by the questions. It was structured in a modular way, with four main areas corresponding to each transport domain (aviation, maritime, rail, road). Moreover, it was translated in 18 different European languages, so as to facilitate the respondents and give them the opportunity to provide their responses to their mother language or their language of preference. A total number of nearly 11.554 questionnaires have been completed and analysed.

The methodological approach and the analysis and results of the survey are presented in detail in D1.1: User clusters, opinion, research hypotheses and use cases towards future autonomous vehicle acceptance

In summer 2020, the four EC funded Autonomous Driving cluster projects, PAsCAL, Trustonomy, Drive2theFuture and SUaaVE,  published a common paper in the OndaVerde Italian magazine. Under the Horizon 2020 programme, the Drive2theFuture project interfaces with other important projects to promote the development and acceptance of autonomous vehicles. You can read the article here.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement no 815001.