Jaguar Land Rover in connected technology & Autonomous Driving trials

Jaguar Land Rover are to test new connected technology in a new ‘Living Laboratory’ and develop ‘Human’ autonomous driving in new trials.

As technology advances, and we expect our cars to be able to do more and more, Jaguar Land Rover are embarking on two projects that will advance the future of driving.

A new 41-mile long ‘Living Laboratory’ of roads is being used to test the next generation of connected and autonomous vehicle technology, with around 100 cars bristling with new technology ploughing roads in the Midlands and mixing with normal traffic.

The plan on this trial is to make cars communicate what they learn with each other, and send that – along with other pertinent information – directly to the car.

It’s a mix of vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication, which allows stuff like accidents and jams – and even approaching emergency services – to be notified to the car, but it also means cars communicating with each other to the degree that it would allow ‘Platooning’ (a convoy of cars very close together) to be a safe reality. Although we don’t expect JLR to be practising this on the trial.

The experiment – called the UK Connected Intelligent Transport Environment (UK-CITE) –  is costing £5.5 million and involves not just Jaguar Land Rover but also Siemnens, Visteon, Vodafone, MIRA and local councils and universities.

Jaguar Land Rover ‘Human’ Autonomous Trials

Further south, in the London Borough of Greenwich, JLR is embarking on research that will help future autonomous vehicles drive more like humans, and less like a ‘black or white’ machine.

A fleet of JLR’s cars will be driven on a daily basis by Greenwich Council employees to try and establish how a wide range of drivers react to everyday driving situations like heavy traffic, busy junctions and adverse weather.

It’s stuff like how humans cope with stressful situations when they’re behind the wheel, how they negotiate roundabouts, how they ease forward at junctions, merge with other traffic or react to emergency service vehicles that JLR want to grab to help make autonomous technology more closely mimic human driving (but without the human errors).

The three year ‘MOVE-UK’ trials – led by Bosch and costing £5.5 million – will also help formulate insurance policies for future autonomous cars, and includes input from Transport Research Laboratory (TRL), Direct Line, the London Borough of Greenwich and The Floow.