UK wants to see autonomous vehicles on roads by 2021

In its ‘Autumn Budget 2017’, the UK government announced plans to support the development of clean and autonomous transport technologies. On the one hand, the UK plans to allocate £650 million for research and development in autonomous and electric vehicles. On the other hand, the government expressed its wish ‘to see fully self-driving cars, without a human operator, on UK roads by 2021’. To contribute to this, it plans to bring changes to the regulatory framework, including with relation to the conditions under which driverless cars can be tested on public roads without a human safety operator. Moreover, the  National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) is to launch an innovation prize to determine how future roadbuilding should adapt to support self-driving cars.