California will not be the only place to test driverless cars on public roads, come 2015. The UK Department for Transport is pushing for these new autonomous vehicles on public roads by January 2015, after missing previous dates.
The first date announced would have brought driverless cars to the UK by the end of 2013, but the department missed that date. They are hoping to not miss the 2015 date, with rivals like Sweden and Japan offering public roads for self-driving cars.
Right now, the reason the UK and other countries are offering their public roads is for testing and early growth. Nobody knows what the self-driving car industry could be worth, but like space mining, the country offering the least restrictions will get the most interest.
The treasury will offer £10 million to a city willing to test the driverless cars. Google and some other automotive companies want to have testing grounds in public, in order to gauge more information on what the driverless car’s AI will do in certain situations.
Building an ecosystem of information for the road is vital for the driverless car to succeed. Google has spent a good few years simply getting roads right and teaching the AI what to do when presented with a situation, like a railroad crossing.
The UK has been a good place for new automotive and space industries, alongside aircraft manufacturing. The amount of product exported from the United Kingdom has slowed as global trade grows, but this has allowed the UK to focus on more high-tech industries.
Nobody knows the future of driverless cars, like most of Google’s “moonshot” projects, it is hard to really figure out how popular the tech will be with the general public. If Google can offer the software for driverless cars out to automotive manufacturers, this could make the tech more popular.
