VDA flagship initiative for autonomous and connected driving

Global competition with new, financially strong market participants and the rapid digitization of mobility and beyond require an unprecedented speed of innovation and enormous investments in research and development. The VDA flagship initiative's answer to this is cooperation. Through intensively networked large-scale projects and increased transparency in pre-competitive basic research, the VDA flagship initiative aims to build up broad expertise in the key technologies for autonomous connected driving in Germany.

Within the flagship initiative, the participating industrial partners discuss and develop a joint position on research and development needs. Politicians can draw on this coordinated industrial position and align funding priorities accordingly. Through intensive cooperation with the relevant federal ministries, the flagship initiative has succeeded in strengthening the coherence in the orientation of national funding policy for autonomous connected driving and increasing convergence in technology development across programs and projects.

The members of the VDA flagship initiative identify and work together to develop the important topics and fields of action for the development of autonomous connected driving. As a coordination body, it initiates large, open-access consortium projects. Since the flagship initiative was founded in autumn 2016, important large-scale projects have already been launched with a cross-industry and cross-research partner network.

Designed in the form of project families, research and development resources are used efficiently. Within the project families, synergies between projects are leveraged when requirements and research content overlap and results are shared across project boundaries. New projects are specifically based on the results of existing projects. This avoids redundancies and bad investments and enables the project results to be highly compatible and usable.

The project families KI Familie, Pegasus and @City developed by the flagship initiative address the research and development fields of autonomous and connected driving that are particularly important for competitiveness. While the AI family focuses on data generation and safe artificial intelligence, the project work in the Pegasus family revolves around standards for testing and safety validation of highly automated driving functions. The @City family focuses on expanding automation and operational design domains (ODD) with a focus on urban traffic.

Current developments in the field of AI are leading to a paradigm shift in the development of autonomous driving functions. With a new generation of projects within the AI family, the flagship initiative is seizing the opportunity to once again take a leading role in the use of generative AI for autonomous driving through broad cooperation between partners from industry and science.

With the support of the VDA, the flagship initiative has successfully anchored the will to cooperate in the industry and set new standards in pre-competitive cooperation. Today, the flagship initiative is making a significant contribution to ensuring that the German automotive industry continues to set standards with its path to autonomous connected driving and takes the lead in shaping the necessary technology development.