UK driverless car projects awarded £20m in government funding

Eight UK driverless car projects to research communication between vehicles and infrastructure

Eight new UK driverless car projects have been awarded a total of £20m in government funding.

The projects will include work to "research and develop enhanced communication between vehicles and roadside infrastructure or urban environments", as well as development of "talking car technologies".

The announcement was made by business secretary Sajid Javid while visiting "the autonomous vehicles test bed" in Nuneaton.

The £20m bounty is being drawn from the government's £100m "Intelligent Mobility Fund" that, it says, is ringfenced for projects such as autonomous shuttles for visually-impaired passengers to "new simulation trials for autonomous pods" in general.

Driverless cars will soon be tested in earnest in Bristol, Coventry, Greenwich and Milton Keynes, with track-based autonomous vehicles already apparently in use at Heathrow Airport.

Javid said that "our cars of the future will be equipped with the technologies that will make getting from A to B safer, faster and cleaner", able to alert drivers of accidents on the road and upcoming hazards. Javid called Britain a "world-leader in research and development" in these "innovative technologies".

Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin reckons that the driverless car projects will "profoundly change the way we travel within years, transforming our roads by making travel a simpler experience for drivers, reducing accidents and helping traffic flow more smoothly".

However, what the government also needs to address is the oncoming slew of legal problems that are bound to surround driverless and autonomous vehicle technology.

Corporate and commercial solicitor Suzie Miles wrote in Computing back in October 2015 that the United Nations Convention on Road Traffic, which was only signed off in 2014, still seems to insist that driverless vehicles are supervised, as they need to include autonomous systems that "can be overridden or switched off by the driver".

She asked: "So, if there is a shift of liability from drivers to manufacturers, do our laws similarly need to shift to ensure that manufacturers are insured or capable of meeting any claims?"

While driverless technology is clearly an innovation in the right direction, a wider debate about enshrining the functions of autonomous vehicles needs to be answered in law before government funding can contribute to anything more than highly encouraging prototypes.