Jaguar Land Rover is investing in a 66km “living lab” to test Connected and Autonomous Vehicle (CAV) technology, or connected autonomous vehicles, in real-life driving situations. The first CAV corridor in the United Kingdom comprises streets in the cities of Coventry and Solihull, where the addresses of the company's headquarters are located.
Entitled UK-CITE2 (Connected Intelligent Transport Environment), the £5.5 million project will create the first British route to test car-to-car and car-to-city technology. . Therefore, new communication materials for drivers will be installed along the route over a three-year period. In this way, it will be possible to test a fleet of up to 100 autonomous and connected vehicles, including five Jaguar and Land Rover models.
The test cars will test different communication technologies that aim to share data with each other and between cars, as well as the traffic infrastructure available in cities, including traffic lights and signs.
British Minister for Innovation and Business, Sajid Javid, reported that the UK government is participating with £3.41 million of the total, through a fund created specifically for the purpose of developing autonomous and connected vehicles.
For Wolfgang Epple, Jaguar Land Rover's Research and Technology Director, these technologies should improve road safety and driving experience, as well as reduce congestion and help the flow of traffic in general. They also contribute to better monitoring and management of traffic in large cities, as they capture data from all connected cars and therefore provide back analytics to drivers.
With Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) technology, connected cars will cooperate with each other to exchange information on changing lanes and exiting road junctions efficiently and safely.
"Beyond the horizon" warnings
In the future, the warning messages that now appear on electronic signs on English roads will be shared directly with the panels of connected cars, which would be an opportunity to reduce costs with street signs. In the UK, installing these boards costs approximately £1 million to public coffers. “A well-informed driver is a safer driver, while an autonomous vehicle needs to receive bulletins about the traffic situation ahead. The benefits for cars and drivers are enormous, such as exchanging information about sudden braking that has just occurred or cars queuing up because of a traffic jam ahead. The car, therefore, can act and change the route or even intervene in the direction”, says Epple.
Less robotic autonomous cars
At the same time, in a project by Jaguar Land Rover, public officials in the neighborhood of Greenwich are starting to test autonomous vehicles of the brands that are being studied to have reactions more similar to those of human drivers. The intention is for these cars to record how various human drivers react when faced with situations such as heavy traffic jams, blocked street intersections, storms and weather interference, as well as road works.
Sensors installed in cars mark the natural reactions of drivers in stressful situations that require complex decision-making. The sensors will also capture the behavior of drivers when passing through roundabouts and intersections, when entering lanes with more or less cars or when noticing the approach of emergency cars, such as ambulances and police.
The information obtained will be used in the local government's MOVE-UK project to develop insurance policies for future self-driving cars.
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