Volvo is set to run self-driving versions of its family 4x4s on roads around London next year as the motor industry’s trial of autonomous vehicles accelerates.

While self-driving pods and shuttles were already due to operate on pavements in Greenwich and Milton Keynes this summer, the Swedish carmaker is planning to test autonomous vehicles on public roads in the capital from 2017.

Volvo’s UK test, called Drive Me London, will go a step further than other programmes by using real families driving autonomous cars on public roads. The manufacturer has conducted tests with the same vehicles in Gothenburg since 2014, and plans a parallel public trial in the Swedish city next year.

The cars will record data from everyday users to help develop driverless cars for real-world conditions. It hopes to start the trials in early 2017 with a limited number of semi-autonomous cars, before placing up to 100 fully autonomous vehicles on the streets in 2018, in what the carmaker claims will be the most extensive public rollout of the technology in Britain.

Driverless technology will massively reduce the number of car accidents, cut congestion on roads and save time for motorists, Volvo says. Håkan Samuelsson, its president and chief executive, said: “Autonomous driving represents a leap forward in car safety. The sooner AD cars are on the roads, the sooner lives will start being saved.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Volvo’s driverless XC90 being tested on a road in Gothenburg, Sweden. Photograph: Volvo

Britain is hoping to be at the forefront of autonomous driving, partly due to a legal loophole. The UK is one of the European countries not to have ratified the 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Traffic that stipulates a driver must be in the front seat of a car. However, the government is still working on its own regulation to keep pace with changing technology.

Samuelsson said governments around the world needed to put in place legislation and infrastructure to let self-driving cars take to the streets as soon as possible. “The car industry cannot do it all by itself. We need governmental help,” he said.

The Thatcham Research centre will work alongside Volvo in the UK trials. Thatcham’s chief executive, Peter Shaw, said manufacturers were expecting to produce highly autonomous vehicles that would allow drivers to hand over control for parts of journeys by early next decade, bringing major safety benefits. “Without doubt, crash frequency will dramatically reduce, and when a crash can’t be avoided, the impact speed will also drop as a result of the [autonomous] system’s performance,” he said.



Meanwhile eight research projects in Britain were launched last year with £20m of funding, including trials of driverless vehicles in Bristol, Coventry and Milton Keynes, with the government aiming to position the UK as a global centre for intelligent mobility. Jaguar Land Rover technicians will test the company’s autonomous and connected vehicle technologies on a road in the West Midlands this year.

While a world of fully autonomous cars remains some way off, more than half of new cars sold in the UK have autonomous systems, according to analysis by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. The majority of new cars sold last year were equipped with collision warning systems, with four in 10 featuring autonomous emergency braking.

Safety campaigners in Brussels warned that Europe needed to revise its system of approving new cars to avoid being left behind by technological advances, by introducing “driving tests” for automated and fully autonomous vehicles. In a report published on Tuesday, the European transport safety council (ETSC) said the EU was a long way from addressing the issues that self-driving cars would bring.

Antonio Avenoso, the ETSC executive director, said: “Automated vehicles are already starting to appear on Europe’s roads, but regulators are still stuck in the slow lane. It is crucial that we get a much greater understanding of what the real world safety benefits would be, and what new risks would be introduced, before these vehicles are put on sale.“