It joins ongoing work to prepare for increased vehicle automation in the UK, with driverless car trials due to begin in three cities next year, and the DfT reviewing legislation and investigating the benefits of ‘platooning’ heavy goods vehicles to improve efficiency and traffic flow.

Transport minister Claire Perry said: ‘Driverless technology is the future. We can’t avoid it and I don’t want us to: I want the UK to learn as much as we can and as quickly as we can. And that includes understanding how these vehicles interact with society and other road users.

‘This evolution has the power to profoundly change our lives. Not just making driving safer and easier, but reducing congestion, making people more productive, and therefore helping boost our economy too.’

The announcement was made at the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS) conference, Driverless Vehicles: from technology to policy, hosted at Thatcham Research, which offered delegates the chance to try the latest driver assistance and accident avoidance systems – the building blocks of partial automation.

PACTS executive director, David Davies, said these systems offer a glimpse of what is coming next: ‘Increasing levels of vehicle automation are here – driverless or otherwise. These offer significant opportunities to improve road safety.

‘Human drivers are fallible and it seems unlikely that they can be trained to significantly higher levels whereas technology and engineering will continue to advance. We have to exploit these opportunities to reduce the unacceptable level of casualties on our roads and to make all road users feel safer.’