Driverless cars to be tested on public roads

Autonomous car technology is set to receive a £20 million boost from the government.

The investment will go to eight new projects – six focussed on "accelerating autonomous and connected vehicles from an infrastructure and business point of view", says Auto Express, and two to develop driverless city centre shuttles to help the disabled and visually impaired. There are also plans to equip 40 miles of UK motorway with sensors for live, in-traffic autonomous-car testing.

The funding has come from the new £100m Intelligent Mobility Fund, established last year.

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Around £5.5m has been designated to the UK Connected Intelligent Transport Environment (UK-Cite) project, which is behind putting driverless cars on a "connected corridor" of motorways and other roads around Coventry and Solihull.

Nearby Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has confirmed its participation in the three-year tests, together with communications companies such as Vodafone and Siemens.

In a bid to accelerate the development of self-driving cars and safety, JLR will test 100 "smart" vehicles to develop technologies allowing them to communicate with each other. The cars will be capable of "over-the-horizon" communication to alert each other of potential dangers.

"If you have to jam on the brakes, wouldn’t it be handy if the car following you, still out of sight around a blind bend, was instantly warned?" says Top Gear.

The vehicles will also cooperate to improve traffic flow, particularly at junctions and motorway exits.

Many of the cars will gather information not only from the sensors of other vehicles, but also those set to be installed along the corridor, allowing them to read roadside infrastructure such as traffic lights and gantry signs.

It is not yet known when the technology will make its way onto a production JLR model. The company told Autocar it has no timeframe for such a vehicle and that the project has been designed just to study new systems.

The tests will be similar to those carried out by tech giants such as Google in California, albeit on a much smaller scale.

The announcement comes not long after it was revealed that electric driverless pods, similar to the ones used to ferry passengers at Heathrow airport, will soon undergo public testing in London, reports the BBC.