Skip to main content

EU presents a strategy towards C-ITS

The European Commission has adopted a European Strategy on Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS), a milestone towards cooperative, connected and automated mobility. The Strategy will make it possible to deploy vehicles that can communicate with each other and the infrastructure on EU roads as of 2019. Digital connectivity is expected to significantly improve road safety, traffic efficiency and comfort of driving, while boosting the market of cooperative, connected and automated driving and th
December 1, 2016 Read time: 2 mins
The European Commission has adopted a European Strategy on Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS), a milestone towards cooperative, connected and automated mobility. The Strategy will make it possible to deploy vehicles that can communicate with each other and the infrastructure on EU roads as of 2019.

Digital connectivity is expected to significantly improve road safety, traffic efficiency and comfort of driving, while boosting the market of cooperative, connected and automated driving and the related creation of jobs.

The strategy aims to avoid a fragmented internal market and provide definition and support of common priorities. It plans to use a mix of communication technologies and to address security and data protection issues .It foresees the adoption of the appropriate legal framework at EU level by 2018 to ensure legal certainty for public and private investors. It also addresses the availability of EU funding for research and development projects and international cooperation, such as at the G7 level, on all aspects related to cooperative, connected and automated vehicles.

It also involves continuous coordination, in a learning-by-doing approach, with the C-ROADS platform, which gathers real-life deployment projects in Member States. With the help of the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), projects in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom have received funding.

According to Lars Reger, CTO Automotive, 566 NXP Semiconductors, the EU decision to include a dedicated automotive wireless communication protocol in its newly decided ITS master plan is the right choice at the right time.  He says, “It reflects NXP’s findings after 10 years of research and V2X field-testing: Only a dedicated automotive wireless communication (802.11p) protocol can cover safety critical use cases, such as platooning and emergency braking. These and other types of autonomous decisions require extremely fast communications (low latencies) that cellular networks cannot achieve currently.

“Cellular networks still need further research, standardisation, field-testing and full network coverage. This EU decision sets the cornerstone for very important choices related to the European “Strategy on vehicles of the future” to be defined in 2017.”

Related Content

  • June 6, 2016
    Securing V2X communications
    Cybersecurity developments are moving fast in the automotive sector, but they’re a significant hurdle for the roll-out of C-ITS applications. Jon Masters reports. In the wake of the high-profile hacking of the Jeep Cherokee and problems like the flaw in the Nissan Leaf’s companion app that could compromise the security of data about recent journeys, initiatives linked to vehicle cybersecurity seem to be moving rapidly.
  • January 29, 2015
    EU to support the deployment of common ITS
    Twelve European road operators and authorities have teamed up with the European Commission in the EasyWay initiative to foster European harmonisation and interoperability of ITS through a range of projects on common standards and procedures. The EU’s Ten-T programme will contribute almost US$2.3 million to the initiative, which follows up the on-going European ITS Platform and will continue its activities towards ITS harmonisation across the continent. The EIP+ project will monitor the EasyWay deplo
  • December 5, 2013
    FOTsis targets ‘socially inclusive’ cooperative ITS
    The FOTsis project addresses the imbalances between the vehicular and infrastructure sides of cooperative ITS infrastructures and looks to ensure road operators can help to enrich future technology applications. By Jason Barnes. Several developments have conspired to push the vehicular side of cooperative infrastructures/cooperative ITS to the fore in recent years. The automotive industry’s rather shorter product development and lifecycles combined with economic slowdown in many regions gave rise to the not
  • June 29, 2016
    NXP to provide smart city technologies to winner of USDOT Smart City Challenge
    Dutch company NXP Semiconductors is to supply the winner of the US Department of Transportation’s (USDOT) Smart City Challenge with its smart city technology, including real-time vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication systems and secure public transportation smart cards. Columbus, Ohio’s winning proposal for the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (D.O.T.) Smart City Challenge. NXP, through its partnership with the USDOT, is working with winning city Columbus, Ohio, to help de