British Commitment to CAD Policy and Testing

The United Kingdom is geared towards maintaining its leading role in connected and automated driving deployment. A recent governmental paper identifies urban mobility as one of the key challenges to address in the coming years. The UK’s Department for Transport, an associated partner of the CARTRE project, will prepare a strategy on the future of urban mobility in 2018 to foster this goal. Part of this strategy will rest on the work of Catapult, another associated partner of CARTRE, regarding the testing of autonomous vehicles.

In the same vein, CARTRE partners Transport for London and TRL will open a testbed for autonomous driving in London in the next year. With funding of around 15 million Euro, this initiative will develop a driverless transport testing area in Northern London. It is scheduled to be up and running by spring 2019. The test bed will include a wide range of facilities including connected and instrumented road infrastructure, mule vehicles for new automation systems, private networks and mobility data capture, 5G and DCRS connectivity and more specialist research equipment.

The United Kingdom currently sustains multiple national research projects on CAD, among them DRIVEN and Venturer as the most high-profile trials.