Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (Science and Technology Report)

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Wednesday 20th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the committee for a very fine report, but I will devote my speech to an opportunity that I think the Government are missing: the creation of dedicated highways for autonomous vehicles.

We have in this country a great deal of slow rail. I live in the Southern region, where almost the entire network can be described as slow rail, with average speeds of around 50 mph from one end of the journey to the other. In such a network, we have a track which could easily be converted to a highway for autonomous vehicles and we have a power supply in the third rail, which, again, could easily be converted to a power supply for autonomous vehicles. If we have vehicles—probably just standard electric cars—travelling at 60 mph on a dedicated highway, and 10 mph when they are off that, when they are taking you home from the station, we have the technology to handle that. We do not have to worry about fast image processing because radar is good enough if you are going at 10 mph. It is what we all use for reversing. It picks up the problem soon enough for an automatic system to react if you are going slowly enough. On a dedicated highway, where there is no other traffic, and given the stability of modern cars at 60 mph, we have the technology to make that happen.

My journey from Eastbourne is slow. It has an average of 40 mph, even on the faster services. It is irregular and unreliable. It requires a vast subsidy. It has an enormous maintenance backlog. We do not have a good road service, either. The A27 is single lane for large parts of its length around us, and there are no funds available to change that. Changing the Coastway—the line that runs from Brighton to Ashford—to a dedicated highway for autonomous vehicles would make an enormous difference to all our lives in that part of the world. Noble Lords might think that Eastbourne is prosperous. It is not: it has one of the lowest rates of children with free school meals proceeding to university of any town in the country. Transport is a very big reason why it is like that. It is very cut off and isolated. But a dedicated highway would make a great deal of difference.

As a dedicated highway, the Coastway suddenly puts you in easy touch with Brighton and Ashford. Journey times on a dedicated highway are much shorter. You set off when you want. You do not have to get to the station 20 minutes early. It is a much more individual and, in effect, faster service. It is fail soft because it is easy for little vehicles to get round a problem—you do not have to close down the whole network for two hours because there is some problem at a point. It delivers you door to door. It would make an enormous difference to tourism and business generally, and it would create a lot of business in the north because that is where the vehicles would be made. To my mind, this is a big opportunity, just within the UK, to take a world lead in an area that we are supposed to be taking seriously.

It is the ideal solution for the Oxford-Cambridge route. Why, if you are travelling from Oxford to Cambridge, do you want to go by railway? You want to go from door to door. How do you do that? You do that with a dedicated autonomous vehicle highway. Then things work much better. In a city such as Cambridge, where the centre is occupied largely by old buildings and the new industrial estates are spread around it, you want something which easily gets you from the railway station out to where you want to go. If you are travelling in your own autonomous vehicle, you get there straightaway.

I do not understand why the Government are not investigating this, but I have talked to the department and indeed they are not investigating it. I very much hope that my noble friend will confirm that this is something they will at least take a look at and that they will do a relatively cheap pilot study on what it would take, what it would cost and where the technology is. I very much hope that that might involve a meeting with me at some stage.

Returning to the main subject, we have a Bill heading in our direction on this. My main interest in that Bill will be standards. I really do not want us to get into a situation where the autonomous vehicle business can be captured by an Uber or an Apple, a service provider or a hardware provider, by dominating standards. We have to take control of our own standards and make them open to make it easy for all sorts of people to compete in what will, at some stage I think, become the dominant mode of transport.