From AV Pilot to Public Service: What It Really Takes to Operate Autonomous Vehicles in Europe

Most conversations about autonomous driving stop at the vehicle: the sensors, the AI, the next demo. But once an autonomous service carries real passengers in public transport, the hard part is not the car. It is everything around it.

In Episode 19 of Autonomy Insiders, I sit down with Stefanie Berliner, who leads the DACH business at Holo, and Anders Toft, who runs operations. Holo operates autonomous vehicles for Ruter in Oslo and enables operators to run autonomous mobility services across Europe.

We map who actually does what in a real AV deployment, and why the permit holder, a role most people have never heard of, carries the liability when something goes wrong. Anders walks through the first minutes after an incident, including the critical call between a local issue and a global one that grounds the entire fleet. Stefanie explains why the industry has shifted from proving technology to proving operational scalability, and why cities asking for "just one showcase vehicle" are getting turned away.

We also get into the metrics that matter: why autonomy per road type is more honest than autonomy per kilometer, why remote assistance decisions need to happen within two to five seconds, and what a financially viable operator-to-vehicle ratio looks like.

Topics covered:

• The shift from proving technology to proving operational scalability
• Who does what in a deployment: permit holder, operator, PTA, OEM, software provider
• Why the permit holder, not the vehicle maker, is liable when something goes wrong
• Incident management: root cause analysis, local vs. global issues, grounding the fleet
• What regulators in Norway and Switzerland actually require, and how differently they work
• Why autonomy per road type reveals what total mileage hides
• Remote assistance thresholds and operator-to-vehicle ratios
• How operational experience transfers between platforms and compresses deployment timelines
• What operators must build before Level 4 arrives in Europe
  
  Timestamps:
  00:00 Intro
  01:40 What Holo Does & Where It Sits in the AV Ecosystem
  02:27 Current Deployments: From Pilots to Passenger Operations
  03:40 Why the Car Is the Easy Part: Proving Operational Scalability
  06:39 What Organizations Underestimate Before a Project Starts
  08:21 The Gap Between a Pilot and Continuous Public Service
  09:55 "We Want AVs Next Year": What Cities Must Bring to the Table
  11:30 Who Does What: Mapping the Players in a Real Deployment
  14:21 Contracts, Liability Split & the Vehicle "Black Box"
  15:37 Where Dependencies Create the Most Operational Risk
  17:11 When Something Goes Wrong: Root Cause & Owning the Answer
  19:01 The Permit Holder Explained & the Setup With Ruter
  21:46 What Regulators Want to See: Norway vs. Switzerland, Data & Traceability
  27:51 Safety as an Organizational Task, Not Just a Technical One
  30:23 Inside an AV Safety Management System
  31:56 The First Minutes After an Incident: Local vs. Global
  34:38 Autonomy per Road Type: Why the Simple Number Misleads
  37:39 Metrics of a Maturing Deployment vs. Just Accumulating Miles
  39:09 Remote Assistance: Thresholds & the Operator-to-Vehicle Ratio
  41:59 SLAs When Software Behavior Changes Every Month
  44:26 Edge Cases: How Rare Events in One City Improve Another
  46:08 Where Operators and Tech Providers Misunderstand Each Other
  47:59 What 10,000+ Hours on Mobileye Transferred to MOIA
  52:05 The Operator's Role as EU Regulation Matures
  54:15 Wrap-Up