New test method could accelerate UK driverless car adoption

The technique has been developed through the Bosch-led Move_UK initiative, a three year long government funded project (launched in 2016) that also involves Jaguar Land Rover; Telematics specialist The Floow; the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL); Direct Line insurance and the Royal Borough of Greenwich.

During the trials, which have now completed their final phase, a fleet of five conventionally driven, but heavily instrumented, Land Rover vehicles completed 8500 hours of driving around the streets of Greenwich in South East London gathering data on how human drivers and autonomous systems -  decoupled from the operation of the car but running along quietly in the background - react to a range of different driving events.

One of the key innovations was the development of an event based triggering approach, meaning that rather than recording everything, the system is only triggered by particular events such as harsh braking.

Because the data harvested in this way is more manageable than that gathered using conventional techniques it can be fed back via either Wi-Fi or 3G to a cloud-based system for instant analysis.