Londoners will soon be able to test drive self-driving vehicles in Greenwich thanks to an £8million project run by GATEway and led by the UK’s Transport Research Laboratory.
The aim of this project according to GATEway (Greenwich Automated Transport Environment) is to understand and overcome the technical, legal and societal challenges of implementing automated vehicles in an urban environment.
Volunteers will be asked to ride a driverless shuttle and then take part in workshops and interviews about their experience.
Workshops will take place in Greenwich from June – August 2016 and will form the foundations of discussions around how driverless vehicles could impact city life. Each workshop will be 2.5 hours long and you can participate as a member of the public or as a business with a commercial interest.
Registration is now open through the Gateway-project.org website and although participation is not guaranteed, if you are selected for a workshop you can also ride on the driverless vehicle as part of the process.
Professor Nick Reed, Director of TRL said: "The move to automated vehicles is probably the most significant change in transport since the transition from horse drawn carriages to motorised vehicles.
"Testing these vehicles in a living environment, like the UK Smart Mobility Living Lab, takes the concept from fiction to reality. It gives the public a chance to experience what it’s like to ride in an automated vehicle and to make their own mind up as to how much they like it, trust it and could accept it as a service in the city."
Business Secretary Sajid Javid added: "Making driverless cars a reality is going to revolutionise our roads and travel, making journeys safer, faster, and more environmentally-friendly. Very few countries can match our engineering excellence in the automotive sector or our record on innovative research, and this announcement shows we are already becoming one of the world’s leading centres for driverless cars technology."
Posted : 2016-05-19