on Toshareproject.it - curated by Bruce Sterling
*An interesting article in WIRED USA, but it’s unclear how any such scheme would actually happen. You’d have to pity a robot in the midst of Italian human drivers.
60 Italian Mayors Want to Be the Unlikely Solution to Self-Driving Cars in Europe
A network of local officials in Italy want to turn their cities into laboratories for the vehicles of tomorrow in the hope of catching up with the US and China.
Antonio DiniJul 26, 2025 6:00 AM
The future of self-driving cars in Italy it seems needs not only technology but also (possibly above all) political backing. The good news, then, is that more than 60 mayors in Italy have decided to take the field for the cars of the future.
On July 14, in the hall of the MEET Digital Culture Center in Milan, Pierfrancesco Maran, a member of the European Parliament for the Italian Democratic Party, launched the Autonomous Driving: Italy in the Front Row initiative, which has backing from administrators from all over the country.
Among the signatories to the scheme are Milan mayor Beppe Sala and Turin mayor Stefano Lo Russo, as well as dozens of other mayors of medium-size and small cities. The goal, apparently, is to make Italy the European leader in autonomous vehicles, turning municipal territories into open-air laboratories for testing the automotive technologies of the near future.
Catching Up With the USA and China
The initiative stems from the realization that Europe lags dramatically behind the United States and China. While Waymo fulfills more than 250,000 paid rides a week in the four US cities where it operates, and China has established 20 pilot cities with more than 74 million miles of accumulated testing, Europe is limited to 400 highly fragmented micro-projects—of which less than half are nationwide.
The gap is not only geographical. In the United States and China, private individuals and companies invest billions, while in Europe, public funds are dispersed over initiatives that are too small. Europe’s regulatory fragmentation, with 27 different national frameworks (including differing traffic laws, for example), also makes it impossible to exploit any advantage of the region being a single continental market.
Italian administrators see autonomous driving as a practical solution to everyday urban problems, such as last-mile urban logistics and reducing traffic and pollution in city centers. Extending the right to mobility for the elderly, disabled, and children is also a priority shared by many administrators in the country, as is the use of autonomous vehicles to better connect suburban areas poorly served by public transportation.
But the path to implementation in the region turns out to be more complex than initially imagined, with challenges that go far beyond the technical aspects. For example, the collective mayors’ enthusiasm clashes with an inadequate regulatory framework. Italy’s new highway code, approved in December 2024, with focuses on new rules for electric scooters, zero tolerance for those driving under the influence of alcohol and drugs, and phone use while driving, has missed an opportunity to bring Italy in line with modern times and positions the country as one of “the last of the old century instead of the first of the new,” according to Maran.
Insurance companies still do not cover self-driving cars for public service in Italy, while European approval procedures severely limit the number of vehicles a manufacturer can put on the market. Bureaucracy slows any experimentation: Even to test a simple delivery robot seems to require “going to Mars,” said Milan’s councillor for mobility Arianna Censi.
European Strategy
The discussion at the Milan conference brought out different visions of the future of autonomous driving in Europe. Giorgio Gori, another European Parliament member for the Italian Democratic Party, stated that Europe risks repeating the same mistakes made with cloud computing and artificial intelligence, areas where the continent has lagged behind due to regulatory fragmentation and a lack of large corporate players. “We’re not good at manufacturing, but from a utilization and grounding perspective we would be great,” Gori said…