In cases where the social aspects of technology are very important, legislations have exerted a strong force to adopt innovative solutions. In transportation the most impressive case of legislative actions is the one related to the environment pollution.

Such market appreciation will depend also on the potential cost reduction of insurance in proportion of the reduction of the accident rate. To give an example the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety has estimated that "if all passenger vehicles were equipped with forward collision warning, lane departure warning, side view assist, and adaptive headlights, about 1 out of 3 fatal crashes and 1 out of 5 injury crashes could potentially be prevented or mitigated".

On one side one might expect that the end producer will play the major role for an innovation, such as collision avoidance, very much integrated in the total product performance. On the other end, since the active safety technologies depend very strongly on ICT technologies, one might expect that even in this case the major role of innovation push will be played by the component and system suppliers. The dynamic innovation diffusion might be very different in the two cases.

For instance, the case of driving in a large and straight highway will certainly simplify the task of the system intervention with respect to the case of a narrow and windy road. And what about the risk that collision avoidance will induce other accident after avoiding the collision in the case of city driving? The ERSEC objective is to enlarge the case of different driving conditions where the collision avoidance will take place without the risk of secondary accidents, like out of road in case of windy road and of subsequent collision when driving in city road network.

In principle, the technology of automatic car driving can be expanded to cover other cases when the driver is temporarily substituted by the automatic driving, such as, e.g: finding its way to a free available space in a complex parking place; self driving to follow a preceding car in an highway. The safe consideration connected to automatic car driving become the more important the more the case is extended.

The new technologies developed for anti-collision between vehicles in normal traffic might well be applicable to innovate the technology for AGV in special spaces substituting the today hardware technology with the ICT technologies based on sensors and actuators on board the vehicle. Google did support an experiment with unmanned car driving. Other interesting experimentations can be referred to, such as the one, supported by the ERC, for an unmanned vehicle following a leading vehicle normally driven along all the road from Europe to China.