The 36-month PAsCAL project proposes an awareness-driven and large-scale penetration approach to address all issues raised by the majority (if not all) of the general public that hinder the wide market uptake of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV). It will not only focus on the interaction of the “users” in or near CAV, but also assess the impact of connected transport on people’s well-being, quality of life, and equity. PAsCAL will use of a strongly interdisciplinary mix of innovative tools from both human science and technology, to capture the public’s acceptance and attitude, analyse and assess their concerns, model and simulate realistic scenarios for hand-on practices, and validate the research innovation in a number of trials in the real world. The association to the consortium of special categories of users, such as disabled persons, and of service providers with a global outreach of millions of members and several thousand customers across the EU will ensure results consistency, taking into account major social obstacles/barriers that may hinder the acceptance of CAV and would allow their reuse in new businesses, services and applications.

The GVI results will empower the consumer and strengthen the demand side. This will be achieved by informing the consumers through the involved (inter)national consumer organisation and the strong link to Euro NCAP. This GVI project will be the catalyst and initiator for a fully-fledged Green NCAP program, which will help consumers, authorities and all other stakeholders to identify if a vehicle truly is clean and energy efficient. GVI’s vision is: ‘The highest standard is attributed to a car that maximises the reduction of its own pollutants and greenhouse gasses and, at the same time, operates at minimised fossil fuel consumption and/or maximised energy efficiency under real-world conditions during its life time.’ The GVI project will independently assess the full environmental performance of a vehicle in the most comprehensive manner. It is of paramount importance that complex test procedures and results are converted into independent, meaningful and comprehensive information for consumers that can easily be understood. - To develop a holistic assessment methodology of a vehicle’s environmental performance over the vehicle’s useful life - including a complete set of test protocols and test procedures with the aim to independently test vehicles and assess the full environmental performance; - To develop an independent rating system based on developed testing protocols, for the assessment of new vehicles’ performance across multiple criteria (real world fuel consumption, noise, cost ); - To validate the overall methodology by conducting real world and laboratory testing and publish results of the 49 most readily available low emitting vehicles in the market; - Improve the administrative and contractual conditions to run the vehicle environmental performance assessment program beyond the project’s duration; - Maximising transparency by making detailed test results available to interested stakeholders to perform their own analysis and to spark competition.

The proposal is to create an ITS Observatory providing easily accessible and understandable information on Intelligent Transport Systems and their deployment. The main objectives of the ITS Observatory are to bridge knowledge fragmentation across Europe, support ITS deployment by creating an online inventory of ITS implementations and a dynamic ITS information marketplace and community, and provide a convenient one-stop ITS shop for the benefit of all stakeholders in the ITS community. The ITS Observatory will comprise three main elements; 1) a database of deployment projects completed or underway, 2) a self-service platform for entering all kinds of ITS content and 3) a dynamic information marketplace to find directly answers and solutions for specific needs. In addition, the ITS Observatory will contain insight articles, briefing notes, fact sheets etc. illustrating results of ITS deployment. The ITS Observatory responds to the call MG-7.2b-2014 “Towards seamless mobility addressing fragmentation in ITS deployment in Europe” of the Mobility for Growth call of the Transport challenge “Smart Green and integrated transport of the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020". In particular, the ITS Observatory will directly address the objective to “Reduce the thematic and geographical knowledge fragmentation”. The ITS Observatory will alleviate existing gaps and fragmentation of the European ITS landscape by providing decision makers and related stakeholders with access to reliable, understandable and coherent information on outcomes (benefits and impacts) of existing and ongoing ITS deployment, supporting them in developing fact-based policy objectives and strategies. Through knowledge sharing the ITS Observatory will foster a faster take-up of deployment, avoiding ‘reinventing the wheel’ and previously identified pitfalls and hence leading to larger scale implementation.