Luxembourg drafts a legal home for self-driving cars

Luxembourg has moved to give self-driving cars something they still lack almost everywhere in Europe: a clear place in the law. On 25 June, senior officials presented the content of a draft bill to the Chamber of Deputies' Committee on Mobility and Public Works that would set out, for the first time, how automated road vehicles can be approved, registered, driven, operated and supervised in the Grand Duchy — and who is responsible when something goes wrong.

The text is still an avant-projet de loi, an early draft that had not yet been formally deposited in parliament or assigned a bill number when it was outlined to deputies. But it marks one of the European Union's first concrete attempts to write a comprehensive national rulebook for the technology, rather than waiting for Brussels to act. According to the parliament's own account, the draft introduces 22 new legal definitions to anchor the regime.

Two classes of automation, two sets of rules

The bill divides automated vehicles into two categories according to how much they can do without a human. The first covers “conditionally automated” vehicles, which keep obligations on a human driver who must be ready to take back control — broadly the level the automotive industry classifies as SAE Level 3. The second covers “highly automated” vehicles, closer to SAE Level 4, which can run without a driver in the seat but must be overseen through remote management.

A guiding principle runs through both: an automated system must behave on the road like “a normally prudent and competent human driver,” in the words of the draft. In its initial phase the framework targets M1 passenger vehicles — ordinary cars seating up to eight people — with other categories to be added later by grand-ducal regulation.

Félicie Weycker, a senior official at the Ministry of Mobility and Public Works, told deputies the law would reach back up the supply chain as well as out to the road.

The draft bill provides for obligations on the manufacturer, as well as specific conditions relating to type-approval, registration and entry into circulation.

On the question that has dogged the technology — who is liable in a crash — the bill clarifies responsibility between the operator and the driver and sets out their criminal-liability regime, alongside the manufacturer obligations Weycker described. It also restates the ethical principles drawn from Germany's 2017 expert commission: property damage takes precedence over personal injury, no algorithm may discriminate between people, and the system must always minimise risk.

A small country betting on being first

The bill is the legislative spine of a broader strategy, “Automatiséiert Fueren 2028,” presented in October 2025 by Mobility Minister Yuriko Backes and Economy Minister Lex Delles. Its stated ambition is striking for a country of fewer than 700,000 people: to make Luxembourg the first EU member state with a complete legal framework for the everyday use of automated vehicles by 2028.

Built on six structural axes — from regulation and skills to international cooperation — the strategy sets five priority use cases to reach by 2027:

• robotaxis;
• last-mile automated shuttles;
• valet and automated parking in restricted environments;
• automation in logistics;
• driver-assistance systems for safer motorway travel.

The government frames its method as a sequence — regulate, test, certify, deploy — rather than a single switch being flipped. Luxembourg's compact, dense road network, its trilingual workforce and its cross-border traffic with France, Germany and Belgium are pitched as advantages, turning the whole country into a manageable laboratory.

Backes has been candid that the opportunity comes with conditions. “A chance for Luxembourg,” she said of the technology, “but only on condition that the questions of liability, safety and ethics are properly built in.”

Filling a gap the EU has left open

Part of the rationale is that there is, as yet, no EU-wide regulation governing self-driving vehicles — only a patchwork of type-approval rules and national experiments. Luxembourg is trying to fill that gap while keeping its framework compatible with a future European regime. The draft's reliance on type-approval and registration is designed to dovetail with the bloc's existing vehicle-homologation system rather than cut across it.

On 8 June, Backes and 16 EU counterparts signed a joint declaration committing to build large-scale cross-border testing corridors and to harmonise homologation, safety and operating rules — an effort that traces back to a pioneering Luxembourg–France–Germany test corridor opened in 2017. The same day, Backes and Belgium's Jean-Luc Crucke rode an automated vehicle operated by Pony.ai at the coach firm Voyages Emile Weber in Canach.

That demonstration was not a one-off. In March 2025, Luxembourg granted Pony.ai Europe its first permit for scientific testing of Level 4 vehicles on public roads, in partnership with Emile Weber, with trials running around Lenningen and Canach; the University of Luxembourg's SnT research centre has tested on the Kirchberg plateau since 2022. A human safety driver still remains mandatory in every case.

Jobs, timing and the road ahead

The draft is not without friction. During the committee hearing, deputies raised the potential impact on roughly 11,000 professional drivers in Luxembourg and the risk that cheap automated rides could pull passengers away from public transport. Backes has anchored the case for change in safety, citing the roughly 20,000 people killed on EU roads each year.

On timing, the government wants to send the avant-projet to the Council of Government before the summer break, with the minister hoping for a parliamentary vote in 2027 once the required advisory bodies have weighed in. If the calendar holds, Luxembourg could have its rules in place well before most of its neighbours — and before the EU writes its own.