Work to bring driverless cars to Britain’s streets has reached a milestone with the first demonstration of an autonomous fleet driving in a “complex urban environment” in London.
Ford Mondeos fitted with autonomous technology from the UK tech firm Oxbotica operated on public roads around the former Olympic Park in Stratford this week. Directors of the £13.6m Driven programme, a partially government-funded consortium, said it had “exceeded their initial plan” and was a significant step in confirming autonomous vehicles could operate in real-life situations in a large European city.
Oxbotica said first passenger trials of a separate venture, an autonomous ride-sharing taxi service planned with the cab firm Addison Lee in the capital, could now start in June 2020.
The Driven team – a combination of local authority planners, insurers, cyber-security and data experts, as well as Oxbotica – have been conducting trials in Oxford to examine what they called the “ecosystem” around autonomous vehicles, such as potential problems with hackers, communications technology and the legal framework.
For now, the cars are operated with a safety driver in the front seat ready to take control, and prompted by the technology to decide whether to intervene in difficult situations. On an otherwise autonomous spin around Stratford’s East Village, through A-roads, traffic intersections and residential streets, the safety driver in the Guardian’s car only once opted to grab the wheel as a precaution, when an oncoming minicab swerved around a parked lorry.
Dr Graeme Smith, Driven’s programme director and Oxbotica’s senior vice-president, said the project was making “autonomous vehicles a reality on our roads”.
He said: “The car is a bauble on top of the iceberg: underpinning that is a host of other things that need to happen, from cybersecurity to ensure we have constant, secure communication; insurers for product liability and real-life risk assessment.”
Smith added that while there would be “small pockets” of autonomous transport, the constraints meant the cars were “at least five years away from being a service for robotaxis, and 10 years for showrooms.”
Prof Paul Newman, the founder and chief technical officer of Oxbotica, said the ambition for the British technology went well beyond driverless cars, with a system removed from GPS tracking and not reliant on maps. He said: “We’re going to change the way people and goods move anywhere and everywhere.”
Wider use of autonomy in the mining and construction sectors was likely before transport, he said.
If Mondeo Man was once emblematic of a certain type of Briton, some might worry to see the Ford car’s driver supplanted by a computer in the boot and a set of sensors on the roof.
“There is no doubt we’re not going to be sitting behind wheels in the future. But there will be different jobs around the technology,” Newman said. “It is going to be a revolution but not a tragedy: more people will survive [on roads]; these vehicles will share their experiences and be even safer.”
George Freeman, the transport minister, said the successful Driven trial “cements our position as a global leader in this space”.
Meanwhile, the first public demonstrations of Britain’s first full-size autonomous bus took place in Birmingham, on a test route on the National Exhibition Centre car park. The single-deckers will start trials carrying up to 42 passengers on a 15-mile route between Fife and Edinburgh next year.
