WHAT ROLE WILL THEY PLAY?

It is estimated that the average car spends 95% of its life parked and a driver spend 106 days of their life looking for parking. This begs the question of why bother owning a car at all if it goes unused most of the time and a lot of the time it is used is spent trying to find somewhere to park it?

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Driverless cars will without a doubt change mobility and the ownership culture surrounding cars. With driverless cars initially coexisting with conventional cars, the safety risks of driverless cars will be much lower than normal cars and so the insurance cost will start to decrease. Relative to driverless vehicles, normal cars will be riskier due to the human error that is associated and therefore insurance will be higher and create more pressure on those to relinquish ownership of their vehicles.

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It is therefore expected that people will prefer 'mobility-on-demand' where, rather than owning a car, they use a service that provides them with a car when they require it and they will therefore only be paying for the time they are using this service. In terms of driverless vehicles, the customer would simply summon a car when required which will take them to their destination. No garage or driveway is required, no time is spent parking and no money is spent on road tax, insurance and MOT around the clock. 

WHAT IS THE CURRENT UK OUTLOOK?

The UK government is determined to make the UK a major player in the development and wide-spread introduction of driverless vehicles by introducing the Modern Transport Bill and investing £109 million in research and development as part of its Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund which is match-funded by the private sector including by Ford, Jaguar Land Rover and Tata. The code of practice for testing and implementation has been developed largely by industry - for industry. The UK isn't legally restricted like other EU countries are because it hasn't ratified the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic and therefore do not require all cars to have a driver like the other countries that subscribe to the convention.
The driverless car sector is growing at 16% per annum and the government estimates that by 2025 it will be worth £900 billion globally.

HOW WILL DRIVERLESS CARS BE ACCESSED?

Driverless Cars will be implemented as part of a multi-modal transport strategy. The cars are based in the centre of Birmingham at our SmartHub which is located near key transport links including the tramline, the three central Birmingham train stations and Curzon Street where the future HS2 station will be situated. Cars can be ordered and accessed through our smartphone app, Urban Wave, downloadable from the App Store and Google Play. The service provided is similar to Uber, Zipcar and Lyft.