“The important thing is it’s the first time that we’ve put a self-driving vehicle in the UK in a public space,” Neil Fulton, a programme director at the government-sponsored Transport Systems Catapult which coordinated the project, told Reuters.”If people can see that these vehicles are capable of driving themselves they can gain trust in them,” he said.
The pod, fitted with software developed by the Oxford Robotics Institute, has a tablet computer on the dashboard which allows the car to switch to autonomous mode with a touch of the screen.
Carmakers Jaguar Land Rover and Ford are both part of driverless car projects in Britain, as major automakers seek to head off the challenge from technology firms such as Alphabet Inc’s Google, which is also developing autonomous vehicles.