This paper describes a framework used to develop and run automotive applications both on board of vehicles and in laboratory. It includes the recording system designed and implemented in the GOLD framework. The system can record data from different sensors, such as cameras, laserscanners, radars, GPS, IMU, IO boards. The system can easily be expanded adding new device drivers. An in-RAM prerecording functionality is available to let the user record events started in the past. An index file collects essential information on each recorded event, such as timestamp, source identifier, and other source-specific data. Different file formats can be used to store data on disks; standard file formats are available for images and audio, small data such as CAN messages or GPS data are recorded directly into the index file. In order to have a faster lookup of a particular scene, the system is also equipped with a user interface that allows to insert tags during the recording. This system has been under development and successfully employed in the last 15 years to acquiring data for several VisLab projects. The description of two case studies is included in this paper. BRAiVE is an advanced prototype used as mobile laboratory to acquire data for different purposes. VIAC is a trip from Parma, Italy, to Shanghai, China, performed to test the robustness of VisLab driving assistance systems; the autonomous driving sessions have been recorded generating a unique database suitable to study and possibly improve the algorithm performance.