Levels of Autonomous Vehicles: Where Level 3 and 4 Are Legal

Self-driving cars are described in six levels, from 0 (no automation) to 5 (drives anywhere). The levels come from one engineering standard, SAE J3016, and they say who is responsible for driving at each moment. That is also what the law cares about, so the levels decide where a car may drive itself.

In late 2026, two of the six levels are legal on European roads with nobody watching the road. Level 3 is allowed on motorways under UN Regulation 157, up to 130 km/h. Level 4 is allowed only inside approved areas, under national laws in Germany, France, Switzerland and the UK.

We measured the road network that Level 3 rule opens up. Across the 27 EU countries, OpenStreetMap maps 79,819 km of motorway and 11,888 km of other dual carriageways reserved for motor traffic: about 91,600 km of road where a Level 3 motorway system may legally drive itself. Every other kilometre, including every street in every city, is still Level 2 territory for private cars.

The six levels of self-driving cars, in plain words

SAE International first published J3016 in 2014, and the current version dates from April 2021. It answers four questions for each level: who steers and brakes, who watches the road, who takes over when something goes wrong, and where the feature works.

The big step is between Level 2 and Level 3. Up to Level 2, the driver is responsible even when the car steers and brakes. From Level 3, the system is responsible while it is engaged. That is why Level 2 systems can be approved for many roads while Level 3 is tied to a narrow set of conditions.

Where Level 3 is legal

Most countries regulate Level 3 through vehicle approval: a car model gets type approval for a system that may only be switched on in its approved conditions.

UN Regulation 157, Automated Lane Keeping Systems (ALKS), is the rule for Europe, Japan and the other countries that apply UN vehicle regulations. UNECE's World Forum adopted it on 24 June 2020, with a top speed of 60 km/h. An amendment in June 2022 raised it to 130 km/h and allowed automated lane changes, from January 2023. The system may only run on roads where pedestrians and cyclists are prohibited and where a physical separation divides the two directions of traffic, as the EU publication of the regulation states.

A legal system still has to sell. Mercedes-Benz, the first car maker to sell an R157 system, dropped it in January 2026 from the revised S-Class, citing limited demand, high costs and technical limits. The Netherlands went the other way in April 2026, when the RDW approved a supervised Level 2 system that also works on city streets, under the newer UN Regulation 171. The driver stays responsible at all times.

The road network where Level 3 may drive in the EU

R157 describes the road it needs in words, so we turned those words into a map query. A road qualifies when pedestrians and cyclists are banned and the directions are physically separated. In OpenStreetMap that is:

• every highway=motorway with separate carriageways, and
• dual carriageways reserved for motor vehicles that are not tagged motorway, such as German Kraftfahrstraßen or Croatian expressways: highway=trunk or primary with motorroad=yes and one-way carriageways.

We measured both per EU country with the ohsome API on the OpenStreetMap snapshot of 27 July 2026, and put Eurostat's official motorway length next to it.

The other 12 countries, from Denmark (1,367 km) to Malta (none), are in the CSV below. Eurostat values are for 2024, or 2023 where 2024 is missing.

What the numbers show:

• Three countries hold half of the network. Spain, France and Germany together have 47,981 km, 52% of the EU total. A Level 3 system approved for the EU is mostly a product for those three road networks.
• Motorways in OpenStreetMap are almost all mapped as separated carriageways: 99.8% of the length. The R157 condition is easy to read from the map for motorways.
• Motor roads add 13%. Dual carriageways reserved for motor traffic that are not motorways add 11,888 km. France has the most, 4,364 km of its voies express, then Germany (2,270 km of Kraftfahrstraßen) and Italy (1,542 km). Whether a given system may use them depends on its approval: some are approved for motorways only.
• The speed cap matters most in Germany. R157 stops at 130 km/h. On 71% of the length of German Autobahn carriageways, OpenStreetMap records no posted speed limit (maxspeed=none), so a Level 3 car there drives slower than the traffic in the left lane is allowed to.
• "Motorway" means different roads in different countries. Poland's OpenStreetMap figure is three times Eurostat's because Polish expressways (drogi ekspresowe) are tagged as motorways; both meet the R157 condition. Estonia has 233 km of motorway in Eurostat and none in OpenStreetMap, where those roads are trunk roads.

Level 4: driverless, inside a line on a map

Level 4 is where the vehicle needs no driver at all, and every Level 4 law in Europe solves the same problem the same way: it draws a line. Germany's Act on Autonomous Driving allows Level 4 in a "defined operating area" that the state authority approves, with a remote technical supervisor. Japan's permits name the route and the remote monitor. The UK permits name the service.

So Level 4 is a geofence first and a driving system second. Our robotaxi tracker lists the 32 cities where such services carried passengers in October 2026; none of the fully driverless, paid ones was in Europe.

What each level needs from a map

The pattern is that every level up narrows the area and deepens the map. Level 2 works on most roads with a standard map. Level 4 works only where somebody has mapped every lane and keeps that map current.

Pros and cons of autonomous vehicles

Pros

• Safety potential. 19,934 people died on EU roads in 2024, according to Eurostat. One robotaxi operator reports 95% fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers over 271.3 million driverless miles to June 2026, by its own benchmark.
• Time back for the driver at Level 3, during traffic jams or long motorway stretches.
• Mobility without a licence at Level 4, for people who cannot drive.

Cons

• Narrow operating conditions. Level 3 systems need a motorway, often good weather and daylight, and in early systems a vehicle in front.
• The handover problem. At Level 3 the driver must take over when asked. Japan's National Police Agency warns that drivers need to understand the conditions for use and respond properly.
• Cost and demand. Sensors, compute and mapping are expensive, and a system that works only in narrow conditions sells poorly, as the 2026 withdrawal of the first R157 system from a new model showed.
• Dependence on maps and permits. A Level 4 service stops at the edge of its approved area, and that area has to be mapped and kept current.

What this means for product teams

• Design for the operating domain. Whether you build a navigation app, a fleet tool or an insurance product, the useful question is "where can this car drive itself", and the answer is a set of road segments and polygons.
• Use road class and separation as data. The R157 condition is a map attribute. A route planner can tell a driver how much of a trip a Level 3 system could cover.
• Expect national differences inside the EU. Level 3 approval is European, but Level 4 operating areas are approved country by country, and in Germany state by state.

Measure how much of a route is Level 3 road

The MapAtlas Directions API returns the road class of every edge on a route. Ask for the route without turn-by-turn text, and sum the edges classed as motorway:

curl -X POST "https://gateway.mapmetrics-atlas.net/directions/?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "locations": [{"lat": 52.5200, "lon": 13.4050}, {"lat": 48.1374, "lon": 11.5755}],
    "costing": "auto",
    "directions_type": "none"
  }'

The response holds trip.legs[0].edges.road_class and begin_shape_index for each edge, plus the route shape. Edge length is the shape length between two begin indexes. For Berlin to Munich, almost the whole distance is motorway; in a city centre, almost none is.

Method and limits

• Country outlines: Natural Earth 1:10m admin-0 boundaries (France: metropolitan only), simplified to about 500 m. Roads close to a border can land in the neighbouring country.
• Road length: ohsome API, OpenStreetMap snapshot of 27 July 2026, ways clipped to each country. Motorway carriageways mapped as separate one-way ways are halved to get road length; motorways mapped as one way with oneway=no count once and are not counted as physically separated. Motor roads count only where both directions are separate one-way ways.
• What OpenStreetMap calls a motorway differs by country. Poland and Austria tag their expressways as motorways, which is why their OpenStreetMap figure is far above Eurostat's. Estonia and Latvia tag their few motorway-standard roads as trunk roads without motorroad=yes, so they show almost nothing.
• Eurostat: road_if_motorwa, motorway length, latest year (2023 or 2024).
• What the measure does not show: where a given car's approval allows it to drive. Each manufacturer's system has its own conditions, and some only work on stretches the manufacturer has mapped.

The series hub, maps for machines, connects this article to the others on robotaxis, drones and delivery robots. The script is scripts/seo/blog-keyword-research/self-driving-car-levels.mjs.