Autonomous vehicles are to be tested on UK roads as part of a UK CITE project
Jaguar Land Rover is to be involved in a £5.5m autonomous vehicle project run by UK Connected Intelligent Transport Environment (CITE), which will see driverless and connected vehicles tested on 41 miles of UK road.
Jaguar Land Rover will be joined by an impressive selection of innovative companies and organisations eager to advance the UK’s development of autonomous technology; Vodafone, Siemens, Visteon, WMG, University of Warwick, Coventry University, HORIBA MIRA, and Coventry City Council will all be tacking part in the UK CITE project.
The companies are teaming up to test autonomous and connected vehicle technology on 41 miles of public roads around Coventry and Solihull, where JLR is based. The project will involve around 100 vehicles, some of which will be enhanced with vehicle-to-vehicle and ‘over-the-horizon’ technology, to create a “real-life laboratory” on the 41 mile stretch of road, which itself will be installed with new communication technology.
Dr Wolfgang Epple, director of Research and Technology at Jaguar Land Rover, commented: “This real-life laboratory will allow Jaguar Land Rover’s research team and project partners to test new connected and autonomous vehicle technologies on five different types of roads and junctions. Similar research corridors already exist in other parts of Europe so this test route is exactly the sort of innovation infrastructure the UK needs to compete globally.”
The three year project is being backed by the UK government, which has contributed £3.41 million of its £100 million Connected Vehicles fund to the UK CITE initiative, with the hope that UK research can remain a leader in autonomous and connected vehicle technology development.
A similar project is being run in the U.S by Google and its partners, who use public roads in California to test and develop their autonomous cars; the internet giant recently admitted a number of close-call collisions had been avoided by test driver intervention.
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