  The current approach to connected and autonomous driving function development
and evaluation uses model-in-the-loop simulation, hardware-in-the-loop
simulation, and limited proving ground work followed by public road deployment
of beta version of software and technology. The rest of the road users are
involuntarily forced into taking part in the development and evaluation of
these connected and autonomous driving functions in this approach. This is an
unsafe, costly and inefficient method. Motivated by these shortcomings, this
paper introduces the Vehicle-in-Virtual-Environment (VVE) method of safe,
efficient and low cost connected and autonomous driving function development,
evaluation and demonstration. The VVE method is compared to the existing
state-of-the-art. Its basic implementation for a path following task is used to
explain the method where the actual autonomous vehicle operates in a large
empty area with its sensor feeds being replaced by realistic sensor feeds
corresponding to its location and pose in the virtual environment. It is
possible to easily change the development virtual environment and inject rare
and difficult events which can be tested very safely. Vehicle-to-Pedestrian
(V2P) communication based pedestrian safety is chosen as the application use
case for VVE and corresponding experimental results are presented and
discussed. It is noted that actual pedestrians and other vulnerable road users
can be used very safely in this approach.
