  The development and deployment of automated vehicles pose major challenges
for manufacturers to this day. Whilst central questions, like the issue of
ensuring a sufficient level of safety, remain unanswered, prototypes are
increasingly finding their way into public traffic in urban areas. Although
safety concepts for prototypes are addressed in literature, published work
hardly contains any dedicated considerations on a systematic release for their
operation. In this paper, we propose an incremental release process for public
demonstrations of prototypes' automated driving functionality. We explicate
release process requirements, derive process design decisions, and define
stakeholder tasks. Furthermore, we reflect on practical insights gained through
implementing the release process as part of the UNICAR$agil$ research project,
in which four prototypes based on novel vehicle concepts were built and
demonstrated to the public. One observation is the improved quality of internal
risk communication, achieved by dismantling information asymmetries between
stakeholders. Design conflicts are disclosed - providing a contribution to
nurture transparency and, thereby, supporting a valid basis for release
decisions. We argue that our release process meets two important requirements,
as the results suggest its applicability to the domain of automated driving and
its scalability to different vehicle concepts and organizational structures.
