Context & Motivation: It is crucial to ensure ethical compliance for critical systems. This can be seen in the case of automated vehicles and their integration into smart transportation. The Ethical AI Framework by Guizzardi et al. offers structured guidance on ethical challenges, but its application must consider the varied stakeholders in AV systems. Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH) focuses on stakeholder analysis, helping reveal assumptions in AV decision-making processes. This research proposes a research roadmap for and a preliminary analysis of the applicability of ethical guidelines and CSH to a realistic and complex case. Question/Problem: We explore how integrating Guizzardi’s framework with CSH supports ethical AV development, showing how the integration helps identify essential stakeholders and ethical requirements to improve inclusivity, accountability, and transparency. Principal Ideas/Results: By applying established guidelines and CSH retrospectively to a large project related to safety of AI based vehicle automation, we aim to evaluate the completeness of support for ethical RE. Our research will identify potential ethical requirements that were previously missed and uncover potential to better specify existing ethical requirements. Contributions: This paper shows the potential and limitations of this research approach. We present a preliminary research design to investigate the applicability of established guidelines and CSH to a realistic project, thus enabling future research on ethical RE. We derive ethics-aware requirements for the project under discussion i.e., SHAPE-IT, emphasizing the integration of marginalized groups, explicit ethical governance frameworks, continuous feedback loops, context-specific bias monitoring, and enhanced transparency. These recommendations aim to advance AV systems’ responsible and ethical design that align with both CSH and Ethical AI principles.