Driverless Cars Set to Hit UK Roads by 2021

Photo credits: Jaguar Land Rover

The most striking element of a package which included £75m for artificial intelligence research, £160m for new 5G mobile phone networks and £100m to train more computer science teachers, was the Chancellor's plan to bring driverless cars to our roads.

The government is promising "bold reforms" to encourage a driverless car industry which its press release says "will be worth £28bn to the UK economy by 2035".

According to Lucy Yu worked in the government unit responsible for driverless car regulation. She's now director of public policy for FiveAI, a British company building software for autonomous vehicles.

FiveAI is leading a consortium aiming to put driverless cars on the roads in London in 2019, though they will still have a driver behind the wheel at that stage.

She said, "We will need to test all the edge cases," she explains. "Different scenarios when it's dark or rubbish blows across the road. For that we can't use the real world as a sandbox."

There are plenty of manufacturers claiming they have vehicles with high levels of autonomy, but at the moment they all still need the driver to take over in some circumstances.

Lucy Yu agrees - FiveAI's plan, when it eventually offers a service to the public, is to go straight to full autonomy without intervening steps. But will that happen on the timescale envisioned by the Chancellor?

"By 2021 we expect our technology to be able to operate without a human driver," she says, although she makes it clear that would be under a quite limited set of circumstances, depending on weather conditions, type of road and time of day.