"In the next ten years, traffic by passenger cars is expected to grow by 30% while goods traffic is expected to go up by 60%. During the same time ambitious targets have been formulated in terms of safety, congestion and protection of the environment. To accommodate this, the deployment of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), or the use of ICT infrastructure to complement road infrastructure and realise the vision of the connected vehicle, needs to be accelerated. Intelligent Transport Systems use existing communication infrastructure and their future evolutions to deliver a quasi unlimited list of applications and services. These vary from emergency call (eCall) and intelligent speed adaptation (ISA) to vehicle-to-vehicle collision warning and intersection collision avoidance. Together these will have an unprecedented impact on safety, traffic fluidity, security and the environment. When fully deployed, this new ecosystem will also generate tens of thousands of jobs in Europe, many of which will be at SMEs as their flexibility, drive and innovation capability is needed to fill in many of the new roles. Regional and national test beds – where companies collaborate on all aspects of the future ITS ecosystem are needed as a key intermediary step to facilitate deployment. SMEs cannot set-up such test beds alone, but associations of SMEs such as the national ITS associations are very well placed to do so or facilitate that it is done. To prepare for these test beds and FOTs, there is a need for top research providers that have been involved in the European research programmes to combine existing components into such a test bed and assess it, before it is made widely available as a starting point to any national ITS association. Doing so at the European level will not only help ensure interoperability, but will also facilitate that developments are rapidly taken-up by all 22 national ITS associations that are today already informally working together within this domain."