The Government has given the green light for plans to test self-driving cars on Britain’s public roads.
The project will be run by Nissan and Oxford University researchers, and will be undertaken on low-traffic roads. A back-up driver will be present in test vehicles as a precaution – and presumably supported by membership to a vehicle recovery provider.
A similar project was carried out by Google, who used a modified Toyota to conduct more than 100,000 miles of tests in California.
The key motivation for investing in driverless technology is that it will make cars even safer to drive, despite the myriad of safety technologies on modern cars.
The Government has also promised to pump £500m into electric car technology, as well as fund driverless technologies. It also plans to widen major roads to cut congestion, and resurface many more, in an effort to reduce noise pollution.
These funding commitments, covering six years, will be enshrined in law so that any future government cannot reverse them.
In the biggest investment in the UK’s roads since 1970, the idea to build a tunnel under Stonehenge will be resurrected, having been previously abandoned due to its expense.
Other plans include adding another lane to the M4 between Reading and London, which is sure to face resistance from environmental campaigners – as will may other projects.
Patrick Mcloughlin, the Transport Secretary, said that underinvestment in the UK road network “…has seen us fall behind many of our economic competitors. Since 1990, France has built more motorway miles than exist on our entire network, while Canada, Japan and Australia all spend four times more on their roads than we do.”
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