HORIBA MIRA Hosts The UK’s First Collaborative Trials of Connected And Self-Driving Cars

News > HORIBA MIRA Hosts The UK’s First Collaborative Trials of Connected And Self-Driving Cars

HORIBA MIRA – a world-leader in advanced engineering, research and testing – today played host to the UK’s first collaborative trials of connected and autonomous vehicles.

HORIBA MIRA Hosts The UKs First Collaborative Trials of Connected And Self-Driving Cars

The £20 million research and development project, known as UK Autodrive, brought together Jaguar Land Rover, Ford and Tata Motors European Technical Centre (TMETC) to jointly demonstrate a number of future vehicle technologies at HORIBA MIRA’s Proving Ground in Nuneaton.

UK Autodrive, jointly funded by government and industry, will start to trial connected (Ford, Jaguar Land Rover, TMETC) and autonomous (Jaguar Land Rover, TMETC) vehicles on public roads in Milton Keynes and Coventry from next year. HORIBA MIRA is one of 16 organisations collaborating in the UK Autodrive project and will provide controlled environment (proving ground) test facilities.

It is the first project in the UK to showcase the benefits of having cars that can communicate with each other across multiple makes of car. During Friday’s event at HORIBA MIRA, the car-makers jointly demonstrated two of the seven connected car features which they plan to trial during the three-year programme. This included showcasing how vehicles can warn their drivers if another connected vehicle ahead has braked severely, lowering the risk of rear-end collisions when the driver’s view is obscured. The second demonstration showed how connected cars can be sent information from traffic lights, allowing them to reduce the likelihood of meeting red lights – potentially improving future traffic flow and lowering emissions in urban areas.

In addition to providing the proving ground facilities for UK Autodrive, HORIBA MIRA will provide safety guidance for the trials, both test-track and city-based, as well as guidance on requirements for the future deployment of connected vehicles. Finally, HORIBA MIRA will support the guidance of Cyber Security for the trials and support the development of guidance for security on the future deployment of connected vehicles.

Further UK Autodrive trials and demonstrations are scheduled to take place at HORIBA MIRA during the spring of next year, before moving out onto closed-off areas of Milton Keynes and Coventry in late 2017. The project will culminate in a series of public road trials and demonstrations to be held in both cities in 2018.

Chris Reeves, Commercial Manager for Future Transport Technologies and Intelligent Mobility at MIRA, said:

“We are delighted to be hosting the trials and demonstrations today and to be a part of a consortium that will help position the UK as a global leader for the development of connected autonomous vehicle technologies.

“Throughout this project we have been building upon our world class expertise in connected autonomous vehicle systems to help the UK deliver the economic and societal benefits these technologies can bring.”

For more information on UK Autodrive, please visit www.ukautodrive.com