Automated Vehicles Bill and breakfast at 10 Downing Street

As a trusted advisor and thought leader to UK government, Chess was invited to breakfast at 10 Downing Street on the 25th March. He was there to talk to Ministers about Self Driving Technology which is at core of the Government’s plans for the future of transport and the UK’s mission to be a critical and innovative economy in the world and a science and technology superpower.

The UK Government is committed to ensuring the huge growth potential of this sector which could allow us to capture up to £42 billion of the global market and create 38,000 skilled jobs by 2035. To achieve this, the Government is taking forward the Automated Vehicles Bill, which will establish one of the world’s most comprehensive regulatory frameworks for self-driving vehicles, based on the international thought-leadership of the Law Commissions’ review. The Bill will provide the certainty and confidence that the private sector needs to unlock research, innovation, and investment across the whole of the UK. This comes in addition to Government investment in the self-driving sector with over £600 million in joint government and industry investment since 2015. dRISK have led two large projects and have been consortium partners in two further grant funded projects since 2019, providing safety assurance for the project, vehicle, route and passengers.

D-RISK – The World’s first true driving test for the self driving car – delivered Sep 2022. To do this dRISK aggregated several data types, from CCTV feeds to dashcam footage, structured and unstructured text, expert input on failure modes of AVs, insurance claims reports, police reports and even went to the public asking them what the weirdest thing they’ve experienced on the road was. dRISK fused these extremely rich data sets into the world 1st knowledge graph of what can go wrong on the UK’s roads.

Connector – an at-scale trial of on-demand self-driving vehicles with up to 13 electric vehicles providing passenger services that integrate with existing transport services within Cambridge.

SCALE – operates two mixed dual-purpose fleets of passenger and parcel carrying self-driving vehicles, servicing Birmingham International rail station, the NEC and Birmingham Business Park, and Coventry University estates operations.

DeepSafe – will commercialise ‘sensor real’ edge case data – a simulation of what an actual sensor would detect – together with AV training tools, for release in the UK and internationally after the project. As well as advancing self-driving systems, the grant aims to support innovation in industry, job creation, and investment, building the capacity to develop AV technology in the UK and export it to the rest of the world.

The event bought together representatives from Government, the self-driving industry and investors; building connections and laying the right foundations to catalyse investment in the UK self-driving sector. dRISK continues to offer its specialism in the testing, training and validation of ADAS and ADS stacks and its new product, Edge, an AI powered Data Insights tool.