# An Overview of Cooperative Driving in the European Union: Policies and Practices
## 5 Concluding Remarks  
The above overview provides an insight into the current deployment activities in the European Union within the field of C-ITS and V2X communication. Best practices across the European Union were investigated, with the aim of outlining the state of play in early 2019, which was identified as the start time for deployment of mature services. In sum, against a total budget of around EUR 300 million allocated for cooperative driving development by the EU's framework programme Horizon 2020, a resulting picture emerges with the following highlights. Regarding infrastructural pilot sites, a common trend can be identified. Indeed, generally from 2016 to 2018, preparatory phases were performed such as use-case definition, specification, development, and validation. Thus, they will be ready to start rolling out in 2019 at the latest and will be devoted to evaluation in 2020. The most mature aspect is the technological one, where ITS-G5 and cellular-based communications have been shown to be ready for implementation, possibly in different contexts and use-cases. Hybrid frameworks have been tested as well, allowing implementation of C-ITS services to potentially benefit from the advantages offered by both communication systems. By contrast, with reference to C-ITS services viewed from an applicative perspective involving final users/drivers, a fairly heterogeneous development can be noted; RWW appears as the only service investigated in almost all the testbeds, followed by PVD, SSV, and VSGN. We identified three possible reasons for such a different state of play among the above-mentioned C-ITS applications. First, vehicle-side technological and applicative issues could delay the deployment of some tasks. In this regard, it may be stated that the use of cameras, radar transmitters, sensors, laser scanners, and digital maps appears consolidated. Moreover, several ADASs, such as adaptive cruise control, emergency braking, backup cameras, and self-parking systems, have already been installed on commercial vehicles. However, in order to take a step forward and enable more complex tasks, as shown by [89], systematisation and harmonisation of issues related to perception, localisation, and the decision-making process in a fail-safe scenario are required. Perception issues concern the development of suitable algorithms able to read the surrounding environment with a high degree of reliability in all operational domains, distinguishing, for instance, a stationary motorcycle from a bicyclist riding at the roadside. Essentially, object analysis is made complex by the various randomnesses involved (e.g., movement, background, and weather conditions), which account for the failure of most test activities and at times also lead to fatal crashes (even not in C-ITS testbeds). As regards the question of localisation, it is related to the error range of the GPS signal. In this regard, the EU undertook further development of Galileo services and their accuracy for driverless mobility. Finally, the human decision-making process should be suitably modelled in a software environment, thus reproducing driver choice behaviour. This is undoubtedly the most complex aspect to be addressed. The latter issue leads us to the second possible reason for the lack of development in certain C-ITS services, which is a methodological issue (i.e., the lack of a robust procedure for successfully finalising the task). This happens, for instance, in the case of advanced driving information tasks. Indeed, although the technology for acquiring and delivering information is mature, the extremely dynamic nature of such a task means that services concerning, for instance, traffic information and smart routing, even if increasingly popular, are not yet consolidated from the point of view of their ability to be predictive and pre-emptive. Indeed, after receiving certain information with traffic forecasting characteristics, users change their behaviour, thus altering the utility and reliability of the same information for the rest of the drivers [90].