UK Government announces winners of CAV infrastructure testing funding

The UK Government has announced the winners of funding to upgrade testing infrastructure for connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) technology. In a statement issued yesterday (19 October), the Government said that four projects across five locations in the West Midlands have been awarded a total of £51m in funding to creating the environments needed for the CAV tests.

HORIBA MIRA in Nuneaton will build a new site alongside its existing vehicle test tracks where automated vehicles can be tested “at the limits of their speed and handling” to ensure they are safe.

Millbrook Proving Ground in Bedfordshire and Remote Applications in Challenging Environments (RACE) based in the Culham Science Centre in Oxfordshire will set up a range of different test areas “mimicking increasingly realistic city driving environments”, where automated vehicles can be tested before being taken onto public roads.

Tw0 projects will adapt real world locations for testing of automated vehicles in live traffic: TRL will lead a project to set up live test environments in Greenwich and Stratford’s Olympic Park in London; and Warwick Manufacturing Group will set up real world test environments in Coventry and Birmingham.

Business and Energy Secretary Greg Clark said: “Combining ambitious new technologies and innovative business models to address social and economic challenges lies at the heart of the government’s modern Industrial Strategy. Accelerating connected and autonomous vehicle technology development is central to achieving this ambition and will help to ensure the UK is one of the world’s go-to locations to develop this sector.”