New EU project, Pre-LSDemo sets out to prepare Europe for large scale CCAM demonstrations
A new Horizon Europe project, Pre-LSDemo, held its kickoff meeting in Berlin in summer of 2026, bringing together a broad European consortium of industry, research organisations, public authorities and mobility networks to prepare the ground for future large-scale demonstrations of Connected, Cooperative and Automated Mobility (CCAM) across Europe.
CCAM research and pilot activities have advanced considerably at European and national levels in recent years. Turning that progress into real world demonstrations at scale has proven harder, held back by fragmentation across mobility domains, geographies, methodologies and stakeholder perspectives.
Pre-LSDemo, short for Preparing for Large Scale Demonstrations, is a Coordination and Support Action project designed to address exactly that fragmentation, building a coherent, harmonised and societally aligned European approach to CCAM demonstration planning.
Rather than treating automated mobility as a single field, the project looks at three mobility domains together as one integrated picture: individual mobility, shared and public transport, and freight and logistics. The aim is a comprehensive demonstration plan covering these domains and their specific use cases, built around a framework in which technological and societal readiness evolve side by side.
A defining feature of the project is that societal readiness is treated as a core planning input from the outset, alongside technological, regulatory, operational and infrastructural readiness, rather than as an afterthought once demonstration designs are already fixed. This thinking is formalised in a Societal Readiness Framework, developed early in the project and then applied throughout.
The framework works across five dimensions, each of them fed by direct engagement with the stakeholders concerned. It begins by classifying the societal actors and stakeholders a demonstration touches, looking at diversity, influence, vulnerability and the risk of exclusion, then identifies what those groups need, expect and worry about, and the conditions under which they would support a demonstration.
It goes on to assess how different groups perceive the positive and negative impacts of a demonstration, sets up structured formats and feedback loops through which objections and concerns can be raised while plans are still open to change, and closes with a qualitative and quantitative assessment of alignment, inclusion and trust across both the design and the execution of a demonstration.
Alongside this sits a methodology and evaluation toolkit, which gathers the expected impacts and challenges of large-scale demonstrations, sets out data and tooling requirements, and consolidates evaluation and validation of methodologies and test procedures.
The intention is that future demonstrations do not start from scratch but draw on a shared and tested body of practice, making results comparable from one site and one domain to the next.
The demonstration plan itself brings these strands together. It starts from an inventory of CCAM use cases and services and an assessment of their maturity, work UITP contributes to directly, and examines the cross-domain technologies that vehicles and infrastructure will need, addresses data handling, and defines the qualification criteria against which candidate demonstration sites can be judged and identified across Europe.
In parallel, the consortium is mapping the common and domain specific challenges and barriers that demonstrations run into, from regulatory and operational constraints to gaps in infrastructure and data, so that these are known and worked through before large-scale deployment plans are locked in.
Running throughout is a multi-stakeholder forum, supported by workshops and joint creation focus groups, which gives cities, operators, industry, researchers, public authorities and civil society a standing space to shape the work rather than react to it once it is finished.
Outreach and communication form a work package in their own right, covering an analysis of communication needs across the mobility domains and the development of an outreach and promotional strategy for large scale demonstrations that speaks to diverse audiences and social groups.
The project is coordinated by Volkswagen, with work packages led by the University of Leeds, ERTICO, VTT and EICT, and further contributions from partners including AWV-MOW, DLR, VTI and TRATON. By strengthening coordination and sharing understanding across stakeholders and mobility domains, Pre-LSDemo supports the wider European ambition of competitive, interoperable and societally grounded CCAM demonstrations at scale.
For public transport operators and authorities, the value lies in what comes before the demonstrations. Site qualification criteria, shared evaluation methods and a societal readiness assessment built on stakeholder input all shape the conditions under which automated services will eventually be trialed in their networks. Pre-LSDemo is where those conditions are being defined.