A share of up to £25m available to research new connected and autonomous vehicle technologies
A new competition offers £25m funding for research and real-world demonstrations of new CAV technologies.
A new competition has been launched for organisations to apply for a share of £25m to research  new connected and autonomous vehicle technologies and demonstrate them in a real-world trial.
The Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) competition opened on 25 June and closes at noon on 19 September.  CCAV will invest up to £25 million in industry-led collaborative research and development projects that develop and then pilot connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) services at scale in a UK setting.
They expect to fund between two and four high quality projects demonstrating UK capability and technologies to a global audience.  The funded pilot studies will be expected to develop and then test CAVs in a real-world public or semi-controlled environment, with at least a six-month public trial.
The emergence of these vehicles offers us exciting and potentially transformational opportunities. In the Industrial Strategy Challenge, four main themes have been identified by the Government as areas of focus for investments.  Although an obvious synergy is with one of the core areas, the Future of Mobility, CAVs have the potential of touching on all the areas identified (Clean Growth, AI and Data as well as Ageing Society).
To date, the UK Government has invested over £120m in over 70 collaborative R&D projects, with more than 200 organisations being involved in the CAV space. The projects’ thematic areas span from full MaaS (Mobility as a Service) and sensors to modelling and simulations.
KTN is hosting two briefing events, one on 3rd July in Glasgow and one on 5th July in Sunderland where you can hear more about the scope for this competition and the application process, as well as networking with representatives from the automotive, telecommunications, transport infrastructure, mobility, simulation and analytics industries.
For more information on the CAV4 competition, visit the KTN funding pages.