Portugal Opens Public Roads to Self-Driving Car Trials From July Under a New Testing Decree
A decree-law published on 9 June clears the way for autonomous-vehicle road tests from July, setting insurance, cybersecurity and speed rules and handing the IMT the job of licensing trials.
Autonomous vehicles will be allowed onto Portuguese public roads from July, after the government set out a detailed rulebook governing who may run the trials, how the cars must be insured and what safeguards their operators must put in place.
The framework rests on Decreto-Lei n.º 113/2026 (Decree-Law 113/2026), which was approved by the Conselho de Ministros (Council of Ministers) in late April and published in the Diário da República (the official gazette) on 9 June. When it was first announced, the Minister of the Presidency, António Leitão Amaro, said the regime would carry “clear requirements for drivers, system operators and vehicles, with a view to guaranteeing safety.”
Who can apply, and to whom
Permission to test will not be open to the general public. The decree limits applications to research laboratories, higher-education institutions and companies operating in the automotive, infrastructure and transport sectors. Each applicant must file with the IMT (Instituto da Mobilidade e dos Transportes, the Institute for Mobility and Transport), which carries out the technical validation of every proposed trial.
Where a test runs through an urban area, the relevant municipality must issue an opinion on the proposed routes and timetables; for trials elsewhere, that role falls to the body that manages the road in question. Licences already issued abroad can be recognised in Portugal, provided the holder submits an application to the chair of the IMT board.
Insurance, cybersecurity and speed
The rules tighten several obligations well beyond those that apply to an ordinary car. Insurance cover must be set at four times the standard minimum for bodily injury or material damage caused to third parties. Operators have to submit risk-mitigation plans and demonstrate cybersecurity measures “capable of preventing unauthorised access” to the vehicle’s systems.
Each test vehicle must also keep a detailed record of its own behaviour — logging the characteristics of the automated driving system, which system was in dynamic control at any moment, and data on speed, steering, braking and any intervention by the human operator. Speed limits for the cars are cut by 20 kilometres per hour below the ceilings set in the Código da Estrada (Highway Code).
The people behind the wheel face their own bar. An operator needs at least six years of driving experience, a clean record free of road-traffic crimes or offences over the previous five years, and is held to the stricter blood-alcohol limits that apply to professional drivers. Shifts are capped at three consecutive hours, with a mandatory one-hour break.
A bid for investment
The government frames the move as a way to widen access to mobility for people with physical constraints and to make better use of the vehicle fleet. It also positions Portugal among the small group of European countries with a working legal route for on-road autonomous testing, at a moment when the Netherlands has authorised supervised self-driving on its roads and Waymo has signalled plans to operate in London. For Lisbon, the calculation is that a clear regime can pull research money and carmakers’ pilot programmes into the country rather than to rival jurisdictions.
