The technological advances of autonomous and connected road vehicles have been shown an accelerating pace in the recent years. On the other hand, the regulations for autonomous, or driverless, road vehicles across Europe still deserve much attention and discussion. In this paper, we introduce the AUTOCITS project which has the main goals of conducting studies on the regulations for the adoption of autonomous cars in Europe, and also to carry out C-ITS pilots in Madrid, Paris and Lisbon. AUTOCITS aims to contribute to European related policy and reference documents on vehicle automation, regu-lations, connected and automated driving, and related road infrastructure issues due to the trend towards higher levels of connectivity and automation, where information provided via C-ITS can be a truly catalyst for con-nected and autonomous driving. The project will specially focus on the performance of the communication links and on the connectivity between automated vehicles using C-ITS applications; in particular, applications that increase the surrounding environment awareness in relation to infrastructure to ensure both road and driver safety being compliant with the regulation framework. AUTOCITS is an innovation project (CEF Program) that aims to facilitate the deployment of autonomous vehi-cles in urban nodes by developing intelligent transport services based on cooperative systems (C-ITS) that will enable vehicles, users and infrastructures to communicate, exchange, and share information.