01/06/2022
The UK Minister for Investment Lord Grimstone has just announced a new funding competition for in excess of £40 million to promote the development of commercial self-driving vehicles in the UK, such as passenger transport and delivery vans. Here, we will take a look at some of the details below as well as a spotlight on a past success story of the government’s efforts in this area.
At the start of this year, the UK government published a report highlighting the economic opportunities that could be realised by a fully developed connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) industry in the UK, concluding that by 2035 the market for CAVs in the UK alone could be worth £42 billion with related investment creating around 40,000 skilled jobs in the UK. To continue to promote research and development (R&D) in this area and to cement the UK’s reputation as a global leader in self-driving vehicle technology, the UK government have now announced that they will be funding a range of projects directed to the commercialisation of connected and automated mobility solutions to the tune of over £40 million.
A competition has been set up for the allocation of this funding, with prospective projects able to net between £500,000 and a whopping £9 million of the total pot. The competition is being jointly run between the Innovate UK arm of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the government’s Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) with the funding split between a deployment strand and a mass transit strand.
Announcing the competition, Lord Grimstone said “This funding will help unlock the incredible potential of this new and growing industry, building on the continued development of self-driving technology, attracting investment and helping make our transport cleaner, safer and more efficient”.
The deployment strand is targeted at supporting R&D projects that will enable the UK supply chain to grow and fill the gaps necessary for the deployment of commercial self-driving vehicles for passenger or logistics services and has been allocated the bulk of the funding at £40 million. The mass transit strand takes the remaining £1.5 million and is targeted at feasibility study projects quantifying the real-life potential of connected and autonomous mobility (CAM) in mass transit solutions in terms of lowering the carbon impact and increasing cost effectiveness with respect to traditional public transport options.
Entry for both strands of the competition closes on Wednesday 20 July 2022, so interested parties are encouraged to prepare their applications as soon as possible. The funded feasibility projects of the mass transit strand will be expected to complete by the end of November 2023, while the R&D deployment strand projects will need to conclude by the end of March 2025 and we look forward to seeing the results of the successful projects.
This is of course only one step in the realisation of the UK as a key home for the development of CAVs. The CCAV was established in 2015 and has since helped to direct £200 million in government funding for the development of connected and self-driving vehicles in the UK, with private investment taking this total to £440 million. One of the success stories of UK start-ups thriving through this funding has been Five, formerly known as FiveAI.
We previously reported on Five’s exciting work leading the StreetWise driverless car development consortium back in 2018 (when they were awarded nearly £13 million in a previous UK government funding competition), and they have built on this to raise over £60 million in funding through their Series A and Series B funding rounds during the course of the last seven years. Investors are typically keen to ensure that their investment is protected by way of an appropriate intellectual property (IP) strategy and a key to their success will be that Five have clearly been taking this seriously. Patent searches in TotalPatent One highlight that Five filed around 10 families of patent applications per year in 2018 and 2019, roughly doubling to 18 in 2020 and again to 42 families of patent applications in 2021 alone. This committed patent filing strategy appears to have paid off, with Five recently announcing in April that they have been acquired by Bosch for an undisclosed amount.
At Reddie & Grose we work with clients at the forefront of innovation – if you would like assistance with your IP strategy then please get in contact. We have a multidisciplinary team of attorneys focussed on Future Transport as well as a specific Electronic and Autonomous Vehicles team that can assist you with invention harvesting and patent filings in this area.
This article is for general information only. Its content is not a statement of the law on any subject and does not constitute advice. Please contact Reddie & Grose LLP for advice before taking any action in reliance on it.
