US driverless cars pose a safety risk on the UK's streets as they can't spot iconic British vehicles, such as London’s red buses and black cabs, as their artificial intelligence has not been taught to notice them on the roads, experts claim.

Engineers have noticed that the autonomous cars made in Silicon Valley are currently using cameras and software that have only been trained on pictures and videos of US vehicles, meaning they won’t detect unique vehicles with more district styles, such as the Routemaster bus and Hackney taxi.

This has led UK scientists and politicians to raise questions over companies like Google and Uber, who have been developing their own autonomous technology, being able to test driverless cars in Britain.

Michael Pound, a professor of AI and neural networks at The University of Nottingham, said: “This is a definite safety concern, in another setting a failure of AI not noticing unseen data might hardly be life threatening, but what about when the network is controlling a 3 tonne vehicle travelling at 60mph?”

MPs have said it is the “Silicon Valley approach” of its products having little regard for the culture and customs of other countries, and only catering for the US.

Julian Knight MP, who sits on the Commons’ Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee, said: “This is an example here of how these new social media companies and big tech companies are so US focused. It means the rest of the world, which makes up 97 per cent of the population, are not tailored to and ignored.