Jaguar Land Rover leading team developing cars that 'see' round corners

The West Midlands-based luxury car maker is leading a £4.7 million project to develop self-driving cars with technology that enables them to ‘see’ at blind junctions and through obstacles.

Britain’s biggest carmaker, which makes its engines at the i54 site north of Wolverhampton, is leading a project called AutopleX to combine connected, automated and live mapping technology so more information is provided earlier to the self-driving car.

This enables automated cars to communicate with all road users, effectively 'talking' to other vehicles and 'seeing' through obstacles where there is no direct view, so they can safely merge lanes and negotiate complex roundabouts autonomously.

Chris Holmes, connected and autonomous vehicle research manager at Jaguar Land Rover, said: “This project is crucial in order to bring self-driving cars to our customers in the near future.

"Together with our AutopleX partners, we will merge our connected and autonomous research to empower our self-driving vehicles to operate safely in the most challenging, real-world traffic situations. This project will ensure we deliver the most sophisticated and capable automated driving technology.”

The need to develop this kind of safer technology was made even more urgent after last month's accident in America, when an autonomous Uber car killed a woman in the street in Arizona in what is thought to be the first reported fatal crash involving a self-driving vehicle and a pedestrian in the US.

Jaguar Land Rover says it is developing fully and semi-automated vehicle technologies, offering customers a choice of an engaged or automated drive, while maintaining an enjoyable and safe driving experience. The company’s vision is to make the self-driving car viable in the widest range of real-life, on and off-road driving environments and weather.

Testing of self-driving Jaguar and Land Rover cars has already taken place on a restricted area of roads in Coventry city centre and the plan is to extend that to 'live' trials on the open road later this year or next.

The AutopleX project has been set up with Government funding to develop the technology through simulation and public road testing both on motorways and in urban environments in the West Midlands.

Highways England, INRIX, Ricardo, Siemens, Transport for West Midlands and WMG at the University of Warwick are part of the AutopleX consortium, which was announced as part of Innovate UK’s third round of Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Funding in March this year.