Now that’s a smart car... Range Rover which reads traffic lights
A CAR that can drive itself around a city and even respond to traffic lights is unveiled today – and could be on the roads in a matter of months.
The Range Rover Sport’s space-age technology even lets it negotiate T-junctions and roundabouts – and make way for approaching emergency vehicles.
It is part of a £20million Governmentbacked project designed to keep Britain in the forefront of driverless car design.
The Sport is one of a series of vehicles being demonstrated today at the Horiba Mira testing ground in Nuneaton before going on to official road trials later this year.
Jaguar Land Rover’s Autonomous Urban Drive technology brings the UK car-maker a step closer to achieving so-called ‘level four’ autonomy within the next decade.
That is where vehicles are capable of carrying out entire driving tasks in towns without driver intervention.
It pitches the firm in a battle against its German rivals BMW and Mercedes-Benz.
Two types of technology are being demonstrated: autonomous drive where the car drives itself, and ‘connected’ drive, where vehicles on the road speak to each other over a sophisticated form of wi-fi. Two cameras in front of the interior mirror and on the dashboard act as ‘eyes’. A JLR spokesman said: ‘This is the first time that a Jaguar Land Rover vehicle has calculated its location, the steps to its destination and autonomously followed these steps.’
Jaguar Land Rover is also working with Ford and Tata Motors’ European Technical Centre, testing ‘connected’ car technologies that will allow cars to ‘talk’ to each other, as well as to electronic road- side traffic signs. JLR said it is developing both fully and semiautonomous vehicle technologies to offer customers a choice of being driven completely by the car – or controlling it themselves but with an added hi-tech safety net.
After today’s trials, the first tests on closed-off public roads are due in Milton Keynes and Coventry by the end of this year, before moving to open-road trials next year. It comes as Jaguar Land Rover announced this week it is recruiting 5,000 new staff – including 1,000 software engineers – to develop driverless and electric vehicles amid concerns of a UK skills shortage. They are in addition to its existing 42,000 workforce. The umbrella organisation UK Autodrive is a consortium of leading technology and automotive firms, local authorities and academic institutions working on a three-year UK trial of driverless car technologies.