Here’s what London’s first driverless cars look like

Engadget reports the GATEway project plans to launch driverless vehicles onto the streets around the Royal Observatory in Greenwich (you know, the site of the big battle in Thor: The Dark World?), which will make use of repurposed Ultra Pods.

The pods are being developed by three British firms – Westfield Sportscars, Heathrow Enterprises and Oxbotica – and are jointly funded by Innovate UK and industry. Heathrow Enterprises will be responsible for vehicle software engineering, having run similar pods for some time now.

“That was flawless for the demonstration and we did consider using it but we had a procurement process and chose the design we have now”, Prof Nick Reed, technical director for the Gateway project, told the BBC.

The first driverless cars approved for London will hit the city’s streets this summer after the consortium behind the GATEway Project (Greenwich Automated Transport Environment) was selected to test driverless vehicles in the United Kingdom capital.

Ford’s CEO Mark Fields discussed its autonomous vehicle project at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas earlier this month.

The trial aims to assess the public’s willingness to use autonomous vehicles in built-up areas, TRL said.

Gateway ProjectGateway’s autonomous pods.

Heathrow operates the UK’s busiest airport. Joining them are Oxbotica, a research-based team that was spun out of Oxford University’s Mobile Robotics Group. These will be electric-powered pods, and they look like rather cramped automated train carriages, and you can check them out at the Terminal 5 in Heathrow Airport.

The automated shuttles will take part in public trials for driverless vehicles, which are being held in Greenwich this summer. Commercially independent and with more than 80 years of knowledge and experience embedded in its history, TRL’s work encompasses a breadth of areas that shape and form today’s transport decisions including: safety, highway engineering and maintenance, sustainability, attitudes and behaviours, simulation and modelling, climate change, engineering, product development, standards and specifications.