Greece

Testing Infrastructure

Currently there is no dedicated testing infrastructure for automated vehicles in Greece. In previous cases, such as the CityMobil2 project, several tests regarding the automated transport system (i.e. automated vehicles and their control centre) were conducted in a restrained environment and other projects like the level 5 vehicle Iseauto, which was driving for more than one month on the street of Greece. That last project covered 1930 km on those streets, servicing almost 400 passengers.

Procedure Description

The main steps of the procedure to be followed in Greece are indicated below:

• Operation is only allowed in a bus lane that shall be (during the operation) dedicated to the autonomous vehicle (excluding other vehicles but not bicyclists or crossing by pedestrians);
• The lane of use should be appropriately marked while signs indicating the operation of the autonomous vehicles (including operational timetable) should be put in place;
• Labelling indicating the absence of a driver on-board should be visible both in and outside of the vehicle;
• The vehicle shall respect traffic regulations related to traffic lights, pedestrian crossings and other traffic signs;
• Approval of the operation is upon the local municipality based on a traffic study that will need also to be approved in prior by the local Road Traffic Police department;

The maximum operating speed is set to 25km/h;

• The remote operator shall receive proper and proven training with regard to the vehicle, its operation and its handling;
• The remote operator shall have the (proven) ability to stop the vehicle in case of emergency, in case of loss of visual communication with the vehicle or in case that the maximum number of passengers allowed is exceeded;
• The autonomous vehicle shall have the same (proven) ability to self-steer, break or stop with a conventional vehicle;
• Specific conditions are set for the vehicle layout, chassis, doors, seats, in-vehicle information systems to ensure and safeguard proper driving behaviour;
• Logs of video surveillance of the vehicle’s operation should be stored for incident investigation for a period of time.
• There are two distinct sub-periods in the process for granting the permission for operation:
  • the testing period where the presence of an operator on-board able to perform emergency breaking is mandatory;
  • the operation period where under specific conditions the operator could be transferred to a remote control centre.

Organisation(s) in Charge

Greek Ministry of Transport, Infrastructure and Networks; local stakeholders (municipality, the regional authorities, the local police and traffic regulation department) and a public Research or Educational Institute.

Contact Information

Greek Ministry of Transport, Infrastructure and Networks

Link to Procedure Website

Information is not available.

Link to Documents

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/autonomous-driving

https://news.err.ee/1155804/estonian-self-driving-bus-project-introduced-in-greece

Further Comments

Please note that the procedure was intended for authorization of autonomous buses, in the context of the CityMobil2 project. To overcome the legal barriers posed by Vienna convention (every moving vehicle shall have a driver and that every driver shall at all times be able to control his/her vehicle) the idea was to remove the “driver” (operator) outside of the vehicle.

In addition, it should be noted that as dictated by the current Greek law, the operation of autonomous vehicles is allowed for a specific area of operation and for a limited period of time and only under the supervision of a public Research or Educational Institute.

This restraint is added to the Geneva Convention constraints which define that the driver may be remote as long as vehicle has the same front, rear and side view than a conventional vehicle. This makes a wider scale test with more AV a very expensive process to fulfill the requirement of an off-board operator for each vehicle.