Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, whether his Department has made an assessment of the potential for driverless cars to improve the efficiency of use of road space on motorways.

Connected and autonomous vehicles could potentially have significant impacts on traffic flow and road network efficiency. The government recognises that this is an important issue and needs to be better understood to properly inform long-term policy and investment decisions. For this reason, the Department for Transport is currently conducting research to explore the traffic flow impacts of connected and autonomous vehicles. This work is ongoing, and forms part of a much wider programme of research and development that the Government is supporting to examine the issues associated with these technologies.