The main objective of SpeechDat-Car is to develop a set of speech databases to support training and testing of multilingual speech recognition applications in the car environment. SpeechDat-Car started in April 1998 in the 4th EC framework under project code LE4-8334. The duration of the project is 30 months. Equivalent and similar resources for nine languages will be created: Danish, English, Finnish, Flemish/Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian and Spanish. For each language 600 sessions will be recorded from at least 300 speakers. SpeechDat-Car commits itself to a strict validation protocol to ensure optimal quality and exchangeability of the databases. The first milestone in this respect is the validation of the recording platform and of a small subset of initial recordings. This paper briefly describes the database design and the recording platforms; next, it focuses on the objectives, the procedure, and some of the results of the early validation stage.