100 Cars Strong Jaguar Land Rover Fleet to Begin Real-World Autonomous Testing

The British company is a bit late to the game, with others already being in a more advanced state, but it's not a gap that can't be canceled with a well-constructed plan and the willingness to invest money and effort. And if anything, this latest announcement made by Jaguar Land Rover would suggest just that.

Spanning over four years, JLR plans to create a fleet of over 100 research vehicles that will help with the development and testing of "a wide range of Connected and Autonomous Vehicle (CAV) technologies." The first stage of this program will take place later this year and will see one of these cars being driven on a 41-mile (66 km) long route on British motorways and urban roads in the vicinity of Coventry and Solihull.

Jaguar is taking a methodical step by step approach by working first on the vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications technologies, an important part of the later development of autonomous cars. The company believes that data sharing between vehicles is crucial as it will greatly increase safety in a large number of situations.

One particular technology that JLR is promoting is the "Over the horizon warning." As the name suggests, this feature would enable cars to receive important and accurate information about various hazards (roadworks, potholes, badly parked cars, an approaching emergency vehicle) long before there was any chance of the driver seeing them. This would work for both autonomous vehicles, but also a driver enjoying his car on a twisty mountain road where direct visibility is affected by the large number of corners, for example.

Another feature brought forward by JLR is the "Roadwork assist." The system uses a forward-facing stereo camera that generates a 3D vision of the road ahead with the software able to recognize cones or barriers. The car will assist the driver with steering through the narrow section, relieving them of the stress these situations usually generate.

The "Safe pullaway" function is best described as "Accident avoidance for dummies" as is intended to prevent low-speed crashes caused by accidentally putting the car in Drive instead of Reverse near a wall or another vehicle and stuff like that.

Eventually, Jaguar Land Rover plans to put all these technologies - and others, we assume - together and create a fully-autonomous vehicle. Until then, though, it will continue to test new technologies in real-life conditions on British roads for four years. Funny how all carmakers make 2020 the end of their autonomous research project, isn't it?