Driverless cars will be on UK roads within four years, says minister

Fully driverless cars will enter the UK in three to four years, says transport secretary Chris Grayling at the Conservative Party conference in the city of Birmingham. A report by Reuters says Grayling is committed to ending the sale of new diesel and petrol cars by 2040. “Newer diesel cars today are cleaner than ever before and of course there will be a role for diesel for many years to come as technology evolves,” Grayling adds. However, OpenText has carried out a survey of 2,000 UK consumers,
October 4, 2018 Read time: 2 mins
Fully driverless cars will enter the UK in three to four years, says transport secretary Chris Grayling at the Conservative Party conference in the city of Birmingham.

 
A report by %$Linker: 2 External <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?><dictionary /> 0 0 0 link-external Reuters false https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-autos-grayling/uk-will-see-truly-driverless-cars-on-roads-in-three-to-four-years-minister-idUKKCN1MB26S false false%> says Grayling is committed to ending the sale of new diesel and petrol cars by 2040.
 
“Newer diesel cars today are cleaner than ever before and of course there will be a role for diesel for many years to come as technology evolves,” Grayling adds.
 
However, OpenText has carried out a survey of 2,000 UK consumers, in which over half of the respondents say they would never consider buying or renting a driverless car.
 
The business information company says six out ten respondents think driverless/autonomous cars will eventually outnumber manually-driven vehicles.
 
A third of participants believe there will be more driverless/autonomous cars on the road than traditional cars in the next 10-15 years. This view was held by 66% of respondents to a similar OpenText survey in 2017.
 
Also, the number of UK citizens comfortable with being a passenger in a driverless car has dropped from 24% in 2017 to 19% in this year's results.
 
Just under a quarter of participants believe autonomous vehicles (AV) will improve road safety compared to 42% of consumers who responded in 2017.
 
One in ten participants think the technology will make roads safer on UK motorways, the company adds.  
 
Mark Bridger, senior vice president, Europe, OpenText, says the more ‘game-changing’ artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as AVs will take longer to be accepted.
 
“AI will enable automakers to analyse, adapt, and suggest solutions based on data. As AVs become more common, the data they produce will become a new, powerful asset for organisations,” Bridger adds.
 
Automotive companies need to ensure the technology is safe and reliable in order to install the necessary level of trust for mass adoption, he concludes.

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