Driverless car systems being developed by Jaguar Land Rover are to be tested on the roads of the West Midlands.
JLT plans to test autonomous and connected vehicle technology on 41 miles of public roads around its Solihull and Coventry bases.
It is part of a £5.5 million UK Connected Intelligent Transport Environment project in which JLR is investing and the Government is providing a £3.41m grant from the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK.
New roadside communications equipment will be installed along the route during the three-year project that will test new systems that enable cars to talk with each other to make driving safer, improve journey times and prevent traffic jams.
JLR, which has its £500 million engine manufacturing centre at the i54 north of Wolverhampton, is also investing in a multi-million research project that will help future autonomous vehicles drive naturally like human drivers, rather than like robots.
A fleet of JLR vehicles will be driven daily by employees of the London Borough of Greenwich, to establish how a range of different drivers react to real-world driving situations, including heavy traffic, busy junctions, road works and bad weather.
The project will help develop future insurance policies for automated vehicles using data from sensors in the cars
The three year £5.5m ‘MOVE-UK’ project, which is led by Bosch, will also use this data to help develop insurance policies for future autonomous cars.
Dr Wolfgang Epple, director of research and technology for JLT, said: “To successfully introduce autonomous cars, we actually need to focus more on the driver than ever before. Understanding how drivers react to a range of very dynamic and random situations in the real world is essential if we want drivers to embrace autonomous cars in the future.”
The West Midlands living laboratory will evaluate car-to-car technology to reduce traffic jams and improve safety and will use a fleet of 100 vehicles, five of which will be modified versions of current JLR models, equipped with car-to-car and ‘over the horizon’ technology, to develop self-driving and co-operative systems in a real-world test environment.
Some of the test cars will be able to read roadside infrastructure, including traffic lights and overhead gantries, and communicate with one another and emergency vehicles to help reduce congestion through intelligent route planning and to improve safety thanks to the technology’s ability to ‘see’ beyond the horizon.
JLR says these connected cars can co-operate to make lane changing and exiting motorways more efficient, and autonomous technology such as Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control would enable them to safely follow each other closely improving safety and maximising road space.
Dr Epple said: "This real-life laboratory will allow Jaguar Land Rover’s research team and partners to test new connected and autonomous vehicle technologies on five different types of roads and junctions.
"The connected and autonomous vehicle features we will be testing will improve road safety, enhance the driving experience, reduce the potential for traffic jams and improve traffic flow. These technologies will also help us meet the increasing customer demand for connected services while on the move.”
JLR was unable to offer a timescale for when, or if, technology developed here would make it to productions vehicles, explaining that the project was designed simply to study and develop new systems.
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