There has been a surge of interest in recent years about the development of driverless trucks and cars. The value of such vehicles is particularly apparent for some functions, such as mining in Western Australia’s desert, where very high temperatures combined with living in an area around 600miles from the nearest habitation, make it difficult to attract suitable workers. The enormous robot trucks being used to extract valuable iron ore are controlled by computers, which can be monitored remotely by a small number of personnel.

Whilst this kind of rugged environment and working conditions makes the benefit of driverless trucks obvious, there has also been considerable interest by the UK government in the development of driverless cars, including the drawing up of a code of practice to enable testing on public roads and re-writing the Highway Code by 2017. One thing in common with all driverless vehicles is that they still need high quality, best price tyres, such as those supplied by online tyre specialist http://avatyre.co.uk/. In fact, it is more important than ever that the car tyres for such vehicles are durable and comply with the industry standards. The enormous tyres used by the mining trucks also come with their own specifications.

One of the reasons for this interest is that the majority of road accidents are caused by human error. Therefore the attraction of a vehicle that has additional cameras and sensors which enable it to take immediate avoiding action is apparent.

The majority of the driverless cars already in development – or even in testing – are intended for urban use, with environmentally friendly electrical power to reduce carbon emissions.

One of the additional (and essential) sensors is known as a Lidar (Light detection and ranging system), which enables the car to recognize changes in its surroundings and to avoid potential collisions.

Part of the research that will be undertaken over the next couple of years is to measure people’s reaction both to being in a driverless vehicle and to being on the road with one. It took several years for us to adjust to motor vehicles, so no doubt the transition to driverless cars will take a similar length of time – and, of course, they will still need those best price tyres!