This Monday, May 11, Clément Beaune put back on the table a topic Europe has been watching for years. Indeed, it watches it with a mix of curiosity, caution and lag. In an interview on France 2, the former transport minister, now High Commissioner for Strategy and Planning, urged France and the European Union to accelerate on autonomous vehicles. Not out of a taste for novelty, but because the United States and China already have visible services. Indeed, a continent that arrives too late often ends up importing, along with the technology, the rules of others. That, in turn, creates a whole series of dependencies.
The Awakening Of A Topic Long Left On The Sidelines
The subject, long confined to trade shows, engineer demonstrations and futuristic utopias, no longer seems so distant. The robotaxis already operating in some American or Chinese cities give this debate a very concrete dimension. They sketch the horizon of a road increasingly driven by software, maps and sensors. Additionally, supervision centers and service platforms are contributing to this evolution. So the real question is not only who will manufacture the vehicles, but who will organize the system.
On LinkedIn, Clément Beaune offered his own framework for reading the situation. Autonomous vehicles, he wrote in substance, are already a reality in the United States and China. And Europe cannot afford to become dependent once again on digital infrastructures designed elsewhere.
The former transport minister does not first speak of comfort, prowess, or even modernization. He speaks of sovereignty. In the French debate, autonomous cars have long been told as a technical curiosity. A bit of foresight, lots of demonstrations, a diffuse promise of increased safety, smoother traffic, reclaimed time for passengers. Clément Beaune tries to shift the narrative’s center of gravity. What’s at stake, he suggests, is not only the arrival of a new rolling object. It’s the potential capture of an entire slice of mobility by non‑European actors.
When a company controls a search engine, a social network or an operating system, it already structures part of our habits. If it controls tomorrow an autonomous mobility system, it also touches public space and daily travel. Moreover, it affects territorial networks, the insurance chain and the management of traffic data. Dependency then changes scale.
A Strategy That Far Exceeds The Car Alone
The issue goes beyond a political office. The High Commissioner for Strategy and Planning made it official: May 19 in Paris, it dedicates an event to a note by Thomas Matagne, Reclaiming Control Over the Autonomous Vehicle: For a European Strategy of the Road Mobility System. The title says it all — and the ambition goes well beyond industrial competitiveness.
Because an autonomous vehicle is not a product. It’s an ecosystem: software, sensors, high‑precision mapping, cybersecurity, legal framework, integration with existing transport. Whoever masters this whole does not sell cars — they impose a way of inhabiting the road.
And in the United States and China, this commercial reality is already established. What Europe risks, then, is not missing an innovation, but importing tomorrow the complete architecture of its mobility. Indeed, that includes its tools, its standards and its economic logic, as well as the economies of scale. Furthermore, in a globalized economy, the “winner takes all” principle is more relevant than ever.
Law, Trust And European Slowness
Behind the term “autonomous vehicle” coexist very different realities: on one hand, driver assistance that still requires constant human vigilance; on the other, a driverless service within a defined perimeter. The gap is considerable, and the imprecision of the vocabulary fuels most misunderstandings in the public debate.
The Club des juristes reminded us bluntly in a report published April 15, chaired by Louis Schweitzer, former CEO of Renault: fifty‑two proposals covering homologation, liability, insurance, data, cybersecurity, ethics and acceptability. An inventory enough to cool any naivety. The autonomous car is not advancing on a blank slate.
It enters a normative universe built for a century around a simple principle: a vehicle has a driver, and that driver is accountable for their actions. What becomes of that principle when an algorithm decides to brake, avoid or change trajectory? Who answers for the accident — the owner, the operator, the manufacturer, the software developer, the insurer, the remote supervisor? Who controls updates deployed after the vehicle enters service? What access will authorities have to incident data?
These questions are not the product of backward conservatism. They define the conditions for democratically sustainable adoption. Europe often has the reputation of arriving late, regulations in hand. The criticism is not always unfair — but it forgets that public trust cannot be decreed. A technology that claims to take the wheel will have to convince far beyond markets: insurers, judges, local elected officials, carriers, vulnerable users, ordinary citizens.
The Social Promise, Or The Real Field Test
This is also where Clément Beaune’s argument seeks its most tangible legitimacy. In secondary sources consulted, notably Journal Auto, the idea resurfaces that autonomous vehicles could open new possibilities for residents of rural areas, older people, people with disabilities and, more broadly, all those poorly served by current mobility offerings. In a country, a medical appointment or a job can still depend on car use. Moreover, a train connection or a simple cultural outing can also require a car. Therefore, this argument cannot be dismissed out of hand.
But it cannot be sanctified either. Between the promise of a more inclusive service and its reality, the gap is immense. However, these systems must be reliable and financially accessible. They must also be compatible with low‑density territories. Furthermore, they must be understandable for their users. Finally, they must be integrated into an overall policy. Recent technology history is full of innovations presented as universal solutions before proving selective, costly or unevenly distributed. The autonomous vehicle will not escape this rule.
From this perspective, France offers a fairly accurate image of Europe as a whole. It experiments, it observes, it consults, it produces reports, it refines its legal categories. But it still struggles to make a strategy readable. At this stage, no precise and incontestable measure emerges from the sources examined: no acceleration timetable, no clearly identified dedicated budget, no stable industrial roadmap, no public deployment plan for the territory. The debate is launched. The doctrine, however, remains to be written.
Neither A Technological Fetish Nor A Defensive Reflex
Perhaps the most important battle is played here. The autonomous vehicle provokes in France two symmetrical and equally sterile temptations. The first is to elevate it to an irresistible, almost natural horizon, before which one should merely accompany the movement of the world. The second is to lock it into a default mistrust. It’s as if any acceleration inevitably led to the abandonment of law. Moreover, this could lead to abandoning safety or public service. Neither posture allows the issue to be seriously thought through. And no leading industrial player is launching into autonomous driving in Europe.
The merit of the sequence opened by Clément Beaune is to recall that the lag is not only a matter of industrial prestige. It engages a very concrete question of public power. Who will define technical standards and rules of use? Who will hold the traffic, behavior, maintenance and routing data? Who will arbitrate road use between individual vehicles, autonomous fleets, collective transport, pedestrians and cyclists? Who will ensure that innovation does not translate into new territorial fragmentation? In that scenario, a few well‑equipped metropolises would benefit from an advanced service. Meanwhile, the rest of the country would remain on the sidelines.
One thus understands why the notion of sovereignty returns with such insistence. It is not merely solemn vocabulary. In major technical ruptures, lag is never neutral. It produces dependence and then forces one to negotiate in others’ standards, technical language and economic models. Does Europe’s lag on the electric car not find its logical continuation in the autonomous vehicle?