It's an ordinary day in the northern German city of Hamburg, where countless cars move along the streets and pedestrians cross at the intersections. This isn't some risky stunt but rather the final tests of technology designed by the European-Union funded L3Pilot project. In it, the researchers developed and tried out electronics for self-driving cars on urban roads and highways. 'It's very important to test automated vehicles under real-world conditions,' said Aria Etemad, who coordinated L3Pilot and is a researcher at German automaker Volkswagen. 'Letting them drive around in artificial environments is not enough.

Automation will increasingly allow vehicles to take over certain aspects of driving. However automated functions are still being fine-tuned, for example, to ensure smooth transitions when switching between the human driver and driverless mode. Standards also need to be set across different car manufacturers, which is one of the goals of a project called L3Pilot. Although each brand can maintain some unique features, automated functions that help with navigating traffic jams, parking and motorway and urban driving must be programmed to do the same thing. 'It's like if you rent a car today, your expectation is that it has a gear shift, it has pedals, it has a steering wheel and so on,' said project coordinator Aria Etemad from Volkswagen Group Research in Wolfsburg, Germany.