This paper explains the methodological approach of policy labs as used in applied research projects on autonomous vehicles in Sweden. While introducing new technologies we need to ensure that regulations and policies keep up with the fast-paced technological development.  Policy labs is one way of managing the perceived conflict between technological innovation and existing regulations. Within a policy lab, a wide range of stakeholders gather to solve the bottlenecks for innovations together. We show through three different R&D projects how the policy lab approach can be applied and which results, improvements and challenges it revealed for introducing autonomous vehicles.