LONDON: Guided by cameras and radars, and negotiating traffic and roundabouts, a self-driving Nissan car took to the streets of London on Monday for the Japanese company’s first European tests of an autonomous vehicle.

Travelling at up to 80 kilometres per hour and moving from local streets to a major multi-lane road, the modified Nissan LEAF electric car showcased the kind of technology many hope to be the future of travel.

Britain has been wooing developers of autonomous vehicles, hoping to grab a slice of an industry it estimates could be worth 900 billion pounds ($1.1 trillion) worldwide by 2025.

It also recently announced changes to allow for a single insurance policy to cover motorists driving conventionally and in autonomous mode, as it tries to get regulations in place to encourage the uptake of driverless cars from 2020.

Britain’s flexible approach to testing autonomous vehicles helped Nissan pick London for its first European tests, the director of its research centre in Silicon Valley told Reuters. “It’s not everywhere in Europe that we can go and drive on the road,” Maarten Sierhuis said.

“You don’t want to go to the most difficult parts of London when you start. The system has to be tested,” he said of the east of the capital where the trials are taking place near the ExCeL exhibition centre and London City Airport.

Nissan liaised with regulator Transport for London and the police ahead of the trials, supplying details of its route and the rules it would follow, and was advised to keep a full log that it would share in the event of an incident, it said.

Published in Dawn, February 28th, 2017