Driverless vehicles to take over British motorways in 2019

A fleet of six driverless vehicles created by an award-winning Oxford-based company are to be trialled between the roads of Oxford and London in 2019.

The vehicles are an ambitious project that benefit from an £8.6 million grant awarded by the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles and are delivered through Innovate UK. With the capability to perform all safety-critical driving functions and the ability to monitor roadway conditions with no assistance, Oxbotica’s smart cars will be deployed in 2019 for the first time in history.

Software enables six inter-communicating vehicles

The project will change how insurance and autonomous vehicles combine in connected cities. There have been a number of mixed reviews on the hands-free cars and concerns by policymakers and law enforcement agencies around the world, as they address data protection and cybersecurity concerns. Despite their issues, consortium has a 30-month project plan, which is going to commence in April 2017.

The important part of consortium’s work is that it incorporates a group of six inter-communicating vehicles furnished with Selenium, Oxbotica’s equipped vehicle manufacturer (OEM) agnostic software, which provides all vehicles with an awareness of what surrounds it and where it is going.

Game changing tech

“Oxfordshire County Council has a vision of technology playing a leading role in transport in the coming years, and we have already adopted a pioneering vision of how intelligent mobility will play a key role in supporting the growth of Oxfordshire,” announced Llewelyn Morgan, Service Manager Infrastructure, Innovation & Development for Communities at the County Council.

“The sort of technology that we are going to see being trialled as a result of this announcement has the potential to be the real game-changer. It will be incredible to have driverless vehicles being tested in the city and across the county and it will really allow people to see up-close how this technology will actually work.”

Edited from press release by Leah Alger

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