  Recently, an increasingly growing number of companies is focusing on
achieving self-driving systems towards SAE level 3 and higher. Such systems
will have much more complex capabilities than today's advanced driver
assistance systems (ADAS) like adaptive cruise control and lane-keeping
assistance. For complex software systems in the Web-application domain, the
logical successor for Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD) is known as
Continuous Experimentation (CE), where product owners jointly with engineers
systematically run A/B experiments on possible new features to get quantifiable
data about a feature's adoption from the users. While this methodology is
increasingly adopted in software-intensive companies, our study is set out to
explore advantages and challenges when applying CE during the development and
roll-out of functionalities required for self-driving vehicles. This paper
reports about the design and results from a multiple case study that was
conducted at four companies including two automotive OEMs with a long history
of developing vehicles, a Tier-1 supplier, and a start-up company within the
area of automated driving systems. Unanimously, all expect higher quality and
fast roll-out cycles to the fleet; as major challenges, however, safety
concerns next to organizational structures are mentioned.
