Endeavour

Scaling the deployment of autonomous vehicle services

Project Endeavour is an exciting project looking at accelerating and scaling the deployment of autonomous vehicle services in our urban areas, and builds on the successful MERGE Greenwich project. 

The project is Innovate UK funded and is being delivered by consortium partners DG Cities, Oxbotica, Immense, TRL, BSI and Oxfordshire County Council.

Endeavour will deliver multi-location AV pilots at locations in Oxford, London (Greenwich) and a third UK city. The first pilot in Oxford is now live with and more pilots at the other locations will take place in Spring 2021.

The project provides us with the opportunity to draw from and build upon our past CAV research, allowing us to channel our insights and knowledge into this new service. As ever, our role will be focused on ensuring that the services are designed for the benefit of cities and their residents. We are leading the work on city-led service design and understanding public perceptions, to ensure these elements anchor the service development.

We are also developing a Mobility Service Assessment Framework (MSAF) enabling comparison of our AV ridesharing service with other mobility services, against a set of social, economic and environmental metrics.

As part of the project, we conducted a survey of the UK public in 2019 to investigate the general public’s perceptions and attitudes to AVs and AV ridesharing services, as well as the extent to which the general public uses different forms of public transport.

This research acts as a pre-COVID 19 baseline, allowing a unique comparison when further data is collected in 2020 and 2021. Data from this study is being used to help shape Project Endeavour’s public trial programme, and is intended to inform innovation and the development of AV technologies, as well as the development of evidence-based transport policies and interventions.

You can read the full survey report for the project here.

Blog posts about Project Endeavour: