Spanish authorities ready roads for autonomous vehicles

The Spanish road safety authority, the Directorate General of Traffic (DGT), is to collaborate with Intel-owned Mobileye to develop vision and data analysis for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles.

The planned partnership will seek to both reduce road accidents and help prepare Spain’s national road infrastructure – as well as government regulatory policy – for fully autonomous vehicles when they become a reality.

“This collaboration allows us to better understand and place Spain in a leading position for the major changes and opportunities that we are facing in road safety and mobility,” said Jaime Moreno, deputy director for mobility management at the DGT.

The two organisations will work together on a campaign to promote the benefits of ADAS for both municipal and private fleet operators to support road safety, as well as conducting joint research to determine the precise magnitude of safety improvement that can be driven by Mobileye’s 8 Connect ADAS sensors.

The 8 Connect technology collects actionable, dynamic data on city streets, such as potholes, accident hotspots, parking usage, environment and weather conditions. This dataset will now be opened up to the Spanish government to prepare the country’s roads for autonomous vehicles.

In line with the objectives of the Vision Zero road safety project – which began in Sweden in the 1990s and has since spread around the world – the DGT will also promote further development and adoption of autonomous vehicles in Spain.

It is already working on regulation for autonomous vehicles and, in the future, will take the lead on the cross-industry alliances needed to help the process along.

Mobileye will assist in the development of a regulatory roadmap, incorporating the supplier’s own Responsibility Sensitive Safety model, which sets out a number of measurable parameters to make sure autonomous vehicles operate responsibility and do not cause accidents themselves.

“The visionary leadership in Spain’s DGT is working diligently to ensure the country is prepared for the arrival of autonomous vehicles,” said Gil Ayalon, EMEA director for after-market at Mobileye.

“We at Mobileye commend the department for their innovative and bold approach to designing the future of transportation in Spain,” said Ayalon.

The Spanish government has previously expressed its intent to become a world leader in road safety through innovation, and will also open up its roads to testing Level 4 – also known as “mind off” – autonomous vehicles, cars which do not require any human attention at any time.