European Parliament event declares 2026 pivotal year for AV governance, calls for European Mobility Agency

Headline Finding

At a European Parliament event on 10 December 2025, hosted by MEP Pierfrancesco Maran (S&D) in the Spinelli Room and drawing stakeholders from more than 20 countries, senior EU and national officials declared 2026 the pivotal year for Europe to develop its own autonomous vehicle technology — or risk an unbridgeable gap with the US and China. The European Commission confirmed its intention to complete the Level 4 regulatory framework by 2027. Three structural deficits were named: regulatory fragmentation across 27 member states, a deployment scale gap (the US and China have logged more than 150 million autonomous kilometres while Europe remains in small-scale pilots), and the absence of a European Mobility Agency with specific AV competences. The event is direct evidence of the CAM thesis: the governance clock is running far behind the technology and deployment clock.

Detail

The event — titled ‘Autonomous Vehicles: Europe in the Driving Seat’ — was part of a series dedicated to European policy on automated driving. High-level speakers included Director-General Kerstin Jorna and Maria Cristina Galassi from DG GROW, who confirmed the Commission’s intention to complete the Level 4 regulatory framework by 2027. Genoa Mayor Silvia Salis attended in her capacity as a representative of the Mayors’ Coalition for Autonomous Driving. Other speakers included Anne-Marie Idrac (High Representative of the French Government), Antonio Erario (Italian Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport), and Oliver Nahon (Swiss Association for Autonomous Mobility). Industry perspectives were provided by representatives from Waymo, Bolt, A2A, and Keolis Group.

MEP Maran identified three priority areas. First, on fragmentation: Europe urgently needs a European Mobility Agency with specific competences on autonomous driving, whose mandate would cover harmonisation of traffic rules, data collection from all companies on autonomous-driving kilometres to monitor progress, and verification and streamlining of approval processes. Second, on scale: while the US and China have already logged more than 150 million autonomous kilometres, Europe remains stuck in small-scale pilots; the event called for targeted funding for the software value chain, removal of restrictions on ‘small series’ production, and a clear exit from the prototyping phase — echoing the recommendations of the Draghi report. Third, on inclusion: autonomous driving must not be limited to wealthy city centres; European legislation should promote integration with multimodal public transport systems to serve suburban and extra-urban areas.

Governance Implication

1. The deployment-scale gap — more than 150 million autonomous kilometres logged by the US and China versus Europe’s pilot-stage position — is the clearest quantitative expression of the two-clocks problem: the technology/deployment clock has moved far ahead of the EU governance clock, and the Commission’s own 2027 target for a Level 4 framework confirms the lag.
2. The call for a European Mobility Agency moves the legitimacy lever: without a single authoritative body, no operator can obtain a harmonised mandate, no city can rely on consistent rules, and public trust in the transition cannot be built at scale — destroying rather than creating legitimacy value.
3. The data-collection mandate proposed for the agency (autonomous-driving kilometres from all companies) is a data-sharing-mandate instrument that would move the fiscal and legitimacy levers simultaneously — enabling evidence-based permitting and performance-based regulation rather than the current fragmented approval patchwork.
4. The inclusion priority — integrating AV with multimodal public transport for suburban and extra-urban areas — directly engages the spatial-allocation lever: without legislative direction, commercial AV deployment will concentrate in high-density, high-revenue urban cores, leaving peripheral communities unserved and widening territorial inequality.
5. The fiscal lever is implicated by the call for targeted funding for the software value chain and removal of ‘small series’ production restrictions; without public investment instruments calibrated to close the scale gap, European industrial capacity risks permanent subordination to US and Chinese platforms — a fiscal and strategic exposure that cities and member states will ultimately bear.

Sources

https://www.connectedautomateddriving.eu/blog/autonomous-vehicles-europe-at-a-turning-point/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pierfrancesco-maran_autonomous-vehicles-europe-in-the-driving-activity-7272614890123456789/