The UK Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy launched a competition in late March to access funding from the government’s £100 ($125 million) investment program to support creating test facilities for connected and autonomous vehicles (CAV). The announcement was made at the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders Connected Conference (SMMT) in London.

The test bed program forms part of the government’s Industrial Strategy commitment from autumn 2016 to develop world-class CAV testing infrastructure. The program will use some of the UK’s existing CAV testing centers to create a concentrated cluster of testing facilities in the UK's automotive heartland in the West Midlands, including; Coventry, Birmingham, Milton Keynes as well as Oxford and London.

The global market for CAV technologies is predicted to be worth £63 billion.Business Secretary Greg Clark says that by creating a "coherent national cluster, government and industry will be able to rapidly accelerate the development of CAV technology in the UK." The move is also expected to grow intellectual capital in this field, attract overseas investment, and create a "national ecosystem that covers all testing requirements for CAV technology from computer program design to on road testing."

The program, whose funding is being matched by industry to take the total spend up to £200 million over four years, is being launched as a grant through a series of competitions. The first competition will allow bids for an initial share of £55 million.

Clark says that by 2035, the global market for connected and autonomous vehicle technologies is predicted to be worth £63 billion.

In a statement, Mike Hawes, CEO of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) Mike Hawes said, "the UK is a hotbed of innovation and one of the fastest moving areas is in connected and autonomous vehicles. Government support and investment... will help this technology flourish allowing the UK to reap the economic and societal benefits."

The first phase of the competition will support a number of projects divided into different streams covering a range of environments for testing connected autonomous vehicles including:

• Public test facilities in a complex, real-world urban or city environment
• A controlled test environment representative of driving in a city
• A realistic and controlled high-speed, test environment