Guest Editorial Introduction to the Special Issue on the 2016 Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge

Cooperative driving is based on wireless communications between vehicles and between vehicles and roadside infrastructure, aiming for increased traffic flow and traffic safety, while decreasing fuel consumption and emissions. To support and accelerate the introduction of cooperative vehicles in everyday traffic, in 2011, nine international teams joined the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge (GCDC). The challenge was to perform platooning, in which vehicles drive in road trains with short intervehicle distances. The results were reported in a Special Issue of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, published in September 2012 [item 1 in the Appendix].