Jaguar Land Rover driverless car

Driverless car systems being developed by Jaguar Land Rover are to be tested on the roads of the West Midlands.

JLT plans to test autonomous and connected vehicle technology on 41 miles of public roads around its Solihull and Coventry bases.

It is part of a £5.5 million UK Connected Intelligent Transport Environment project in which JLR is investing and the Government is providing a £3.41m grant from the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK.

New roadside communications equipment will be installed along the route during the three-year project that will test new systems that enable cars to talk with each other to make driving safer, improve journey times and prevent traffic jams.

JLR, which has its £500 million engine manufacturing centre at the i54 north of Wolverhampton, is also investing in a multi-million research project that will help future autonomous vehicles drive naturally like human drivers, rather than like robots.

A fleet of JLR vehicles will be driven daily by employees of the London Borough of Greenwich, to establish how a range of different drivers react to real-world driving situations, including heavy traffic, busy junctions, road works and bad weather.

The project will help develop future insurance policies for automated vehicles using data from sensors in the cars

The three year £5.5m ‘MOVE-UK’ project, which is led by Bosch, will also use this data to help develop insurance policies for future autonomous cars.

Dr Wolfgang Epple, director of research and technology for JLT, said: “To successfully introduce autonomous cars, we actually need to focus more on the driver than ever before. Understanding how drivers react to a range of very dynamic and random situations in the real world is essential if we want drivers to embrace autonomous cars in the future.”

The West Midlands living laboratory will evaluate car-to-car technology to reduce traffic jams and improve safety and will use a fleet of 100 vehicles, five of which will be modified versions of current JLR models, equipped with car-to-car and ‘over the horizon’ technology, to develop self-driving and co-operative systems in a real-world test environment.

Some of the test cars will be able to read roadside infrastructure, including traffic lights and overhead gantries, and communicate with one another and emergency vehicles to help reduce congestion through intelligent route planning and to improve safety thanks to the technology’s ability to ‘see’ beyond the horizon.

JLR says these connected cars can co-operate to make lane changing and exiting motorways more efficient, and autonomous technology such as Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control would enable them to safely follow each other closely improving safety and maximising road space.

Dr Epple said: "This real-life laboratory will allow Jaguar Land Rover’s research team and partners to test new connected and autonomous vehicle technologies on five different types of roads and junctions.

"The connected and autonomous vehicle features we will be testing will improve road safety, enhance the driving experience, reduce the potential for traffic jams and improve traffic flow. These technologies will also help us meet the increasing customer demand for connected services while on the move.”

JLR was unable to offer a timescale for when, or if, technology developed here would make it to productions vehicles, explaining that the project was designed simply to study and develop new systems.

Jaguar Land Rover sets up ‘living lab’ to test autonomous cars

Jaguar Land Rover has announced a £5.5m investment in what it calls a ‘living laboratory’ – a 41-mile test corridor on public roads to support the development of connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) technology.

Located around Coventry and Solihull, the UK Connected Intelligent Transport Environment (UK-CITE) will be used to evaluate new systems in real-world driving conditions.

The car manufacturer plans to install new roadside communications equipment along the entire route to test vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure systems on a fleet of 100 connected and highly automated cars, including a number of its own research vehicles.

The fleet will put four different connectivity technologies through their paces, sharing information at high speed between cars, and between cars and roadside infrastructure such as traffic lights or overhead gantries.

These will be 4G long-term evolution (LTE), dedicated short-range communications (DSRC), a more advanced version of LTE known as LTE-V, and local Wi-Fi hotspots.

Besides Jaguar Land Rover, others to come on board are Visteon, Siemens, Coventry City Council, WMG, the University of Warwick, HORIBA MIRA, Coventry University and Vodafone. The project is being part-funded by a £3.41m grant from Innovate UK – taken from the government’s £100m fund for CAV technology.

“This real-life laboratory will allow Jaguar Land Rover’s research team and project partners to test new connected and autonomous vehicle technologies on five different types of roads and junctions,” said Jaguar Land Rover’s director of research and technology, Wolfgang Epple.

“Similar research corridors already exist in other parts of Europe, so this test route is exactly the sort of innovation infrastructure the UK needs to compete globally.

“The connected and autonomous vehicle features we will be testing will improve road safety, enhance the driving experience, reduce the potential for traffic jams and improve traffic flow. These technologies will also help us meet the increasing customer demand for connected services while on the move.”

Jaguar Land Rover believes connected technologies will be a key enabler for intelligent transport systems, helping authorities to monitor and manage traffic flow and providing vehicles with guidance to optimise their route.

For example, to improve traffic flow, connected cars would be able to communicate and co-operate to make lane changes more efficient and safe, while technologies such as co-operative adaptive cruise control – already tested by a number of other manufacturers – would make better use of road space by enabling cars to follow each other in a convoy, known as platooning.

Other applications under test will be over-the-horizon warnings, a potential new system in which messages that are currently flashed onto overhead gantries – such as speed limit reductions in case of fog – are instead sent directly to the car, saving about £1m in installation and maintenance costs for roadside infrastructure.

“A well-informed driver is a safer driver, while an autonomous vehicle will need to receive information about the driving environment ahead,” said Epple. “The benefits of smarter vehicles communicating with each other and their surroundings include a car sending a warning that it is braking heavily or stopping in a queue of traffic or around a bend.

“This will enable an autonomous car to take direct action and respond. Drivers would receive a visual and audible warning that another car is causing a hazard out of sight or over the horizon.”

A similar emergency services warning system would potentially identify an approaching connected blue light vehicle before the driver was aware of flashing lights or sirens – something that has been identified as a source of stress for drivers – and warn them well in advance.

“If we can inform the driver, or the autonomous car, much earlier that an emergency vehicle is approaching, we can ensure that the best decisions are made to move the vehicle out of the way safely and conveniently to let the emergency vehicle pass by,” said Epple.

Jaguar Land Rover will test self-driving cars in the UK

Jaguar Land Rover is helping to adapt a section of roads for extra-connected vehicles. Drivers will get early warnings of dangers beyond their vision. And in turn their cars will automatically pass on the alert.

Around 100 ‘smart’ connected and near-autonomous vehicles will use the 40-mile section of roads, mixing it with ordinary traffic. Driving between Coventry and Solihull? This means you.

Engineers worldwide agree that autonomous cars will work a lot better if they’re able to milk information above and beyond what their internal sensors and mapping can harvest. The ‘connected corridor’, as JLR is calling it, is an example.

The sort of info we normally see on overhead gantries is an example. Queues or ice warnings would be relayed directly to the connected car, alerting either the driver or the autonomous system. Possible re-routing around a jam would be sent by the same transmissions.

V2I, the boffins call it: vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. But we’ve also got V2V here: vehicle-to-vehicle. If you have to jam on the brakes, wouldn’t it be handy if the car following you, still out of sight around a blind bend, was instantly warned?

It’s not just about safety. As with similar projects around the world, the communication should improve traffic. It’ll help cars co-operate to merge more smoothly. And it should enable ‘platooning’ - a snake of cars going down the motorway with tiny gaps between them. And smaller gaps for a given speed mean more road capacity.

“These technologies will also help us meet the increasing customer demand for connected services whilst on the move,” JLR. So there you are: your car does the driving while you play what will, by then, be Fallout 6.

The experiment is costing £5.5m, and is known as ‘UK-CITE’ (UK Connected Intelligent Transport Environment). Siemens, Visteon, Vodafone, the local council and universities and MIRA are also part of the project.