For those who dream of owning a sleek driverless vehicle of the future, this generation of autonomous public shuttles — often half the length of a traditional bus with capacity for less than a dozen people — will not set hearts racing. Though they include much of the high-tech sensors and gadgetry required for autonomous driving, the vehicles are designed for functionality rather than speed and style.

“With our first vehicle, the goal was just to get in on the road as quickly as possible,” said Christophe Sapet, chief executive of Navya, a French start-up that designs autonomous shuttle buses that have carried almost 150,000 passengers across Europe, Asia and the United States. He added that Navya’s next vehicle will look “more like a robo-taxi.”

Unlike the driverless trials from Uber and Alphabet’s Waymo, which aim to bring autonomous vehicles to personal transport, a focus on self-driving public transit is a significantly easier challenge. That is because these autonomous vehicles are often limited to operating in the “last mile,” to existing public transit, or smaller distances on often well-traveled routes. That reduces the complexity required to make the machines navigate across an entire city.

In London, city planners conducted a three-week trial in April involving a self-driving electric shuttle moving slowly around a well-defined three-mile route on mostly private roads. Nick Reed, the project’s coordinator, said that by offering people autonomous connections to the British capital’s existing transportation network, his team was helping the city to meet public demand without having to invest millions, if not billions, in traditional subways or buses.

“London is a megacity, we want people to use the public transportation that is already there,” said Mr. Reed, academy director at TRL, a transit consultant firm in charge of the two-year trial in London. “If we can connect people through autonomous vehicles, it’s a big plus.”

Not all of the autonomous vehicles being tested for public transport in Europe are glamour-free.

In December, Carlo Ratti, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stood on the banks of a picturesque canal in Amsterdam to test his team’s latest contraption: a driverless boat.