Anxious to start... not driving in the UK? Though late to the party, the government is has announced that driverless cars will hit the streets in three UK cities starting in January 2015. To kickstart research, the Department of Transport also launched a £10 million ($17 million) fund to "see driverless cars take to our streets in less than six months," according to a spokesman. Once trials start, two different types of self-driving vehicles will be tested: fully autonomous cars with no driver, and self-driving models that can relinquish control to a human pilot. All of that follows an announcement that the government was re-coding road laws to accommodate such vehicles.
US states followed a similar trajectory back in 2011 by first passing new road laws, then approving self-driving vehicles for road use, as long as they were accompanied by a human driver. There are now quite a few players in the self-driving game, which only kicked off in earnest once Google jumped in. New projects have launched from Volvo, Audi and Google again. A UK company called MIRA specializing in such vehicles told Sky News that though it had driverless tech, "we lag behind actually getting (it) into some real field trials."
[Image credit: AP/Michael Sohn]
Filed under: Transportation
Via: BBC
Source: Telegraph
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