AV Living Lab — Autonomous Mobility Testbed (BTC City)

The AV Living Lab is a real-world testbed for autonomous and future-mobility technologies built inside BTC City, a 475,000 m² mixed-use commercial district on Ljubljana's outskirts that draws roughly 21 million visitors and 12 million vehicle movements (about 38,000 cars) a year across 8,500 parking spaces. Rather than a closed test track, the lab deploys vehicles and services directly into live traffic and pedestrian conditions, run by BTC d.d. — the site's real-estate operator — together with the Automobile Association of Slovenia, the Ministry of Infrastructure and motorway operator DARS. It has hosted Level 2–4 automated-vehicle trials from Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi, Magna and a Navya automated shuttle, driving-simulator and pedestrian-safety demonstrations, and a blockchain-based mobility-app prototype ("Cars on Miles"). Independent reporting counts more than 30 discrete experiments run with companies including Google and Toyota, with basic pilot slots priced from roughly US$25,000 for about a month of live-traffic access.

A flagship public event, TEN-T Days in April 2018, drew about 1,100 attendees and doubled as a large-scale survey of citizen attitudes toward autonomous vehicles, later published in the peer-reviewed journal Sustainability (MDPI). Of 153 fully completed post-demonstration questionnaires, respondents rated legal-framework gaps (3.92/5) and cybersecurity (3.66/5) as their top concerns, and gave a below-midpoint 2.80/5 to overall readiness for widespread AV adoption — a cautionary, not celebratory, finding that the study's own authors flagged as based on a small, non-representative sample from a single event.

Toyota's 'DriveMe' vehicle co-sharing pilot was separately offered to more than 30 partner companies and over 1,000 employees within BTC City. Because BTC d.d. is a commercial operator rather than a public authority, the lab sits closer to a public-private living lab than a government-run regulatory sandbox, though the Ministry of Infrastructure's and DARS's participation give it a genuine regulatory dimension. Independent commentary has also raised privacy concerns: urban planner Anthony Townsend was quoted describing site visitors as effectively "guinea pigs being used to evaluate the market for new technologies," given the pervasive sensor and video-monitoring infrastructure the testbed relies on.

Read the full analysis: https://www.btc.si/en/