16/01/2025
This week, the UK government published Matt Clifford’s independent report on the AI Opportunities Action Plan as well as the government’s response, which agreed to take forwards all of the 50 recommendations that had been presented.
The plan aims to make the UK an AI superpower and the number one place for AI firms to invest. This includes investment in cutting-edge, secure, and sustainable AI infrastructure to expand our sovereign compute capacity by at least twenty times by 2030, and seeking a private-sector partner to develop one of the UK’s largest AI data centres, beginning with 100MW of capacity and with plans to scale up to 500MW.
While increased compute power will be a boon for the AI industry in the UK, a key hurdle to pass for development in the autonomous vehicles sector will be navigating the strict regulatory landscape to test these developments. I am pleased to see that the government’s response notes that one of the foundations for enabling AI development is “ensuring that we have the right regulatory regime that addresses risks and actively supports innovation will drive AI trust and adoption across the economy” and that the new Regulatory Innovation Office will work with the relevant regulators to identify pro-innovation initiatives that can accelerate AI and that they will report on the progress of these initiatives by Summer 2025.
Indeed, autonomous vehicles are given as one of the examples for high-growth potential where AI is integrated into the physical world and where the use of regulatory sandboxes to cut red tape can free up development and innovation; and the Regulatory Innovation Office has been specifically tasked with supporting the growth of connected and autonomous technology.
These steps all show the government’s continued prioritisation of autonomous vehicles and the ongoing work following the Automated Vehicles Act 2024 that passed into law (with cross-party backing) under the previous Conservative government. However, further action is needed and time will tell whether the government can maintain this momentum, for example with the secondary regulation proposed in the Automated Vehicles Act 2024.
Home-grown British success stories such as Wayve and Oxa have been trialling self-driving cars, and the CEO of Wayve, Alex Kendall, commented that the Automated Vehicles Act “cements the UK as a global leader” in regulating the self-driving technology sector, and that while “embodied AI in highly regulated sectors, like automated vehicles, will require international regulatory collaboration”, “I’m excited to see the government use the levers at its disposal to help make the UK’s leading AI startups winners on the global stage” through this week’s plan.
Autonomous driving, particularly during the interim where autonomous and user controlled vehicles will need to share the roads, has proven to be a tough nut to crack and many ambitious targets have been set and passed for when we will see the commercial sale of truly self-driving vehicles. It will be exciting to see the impact of these latest steps and the continued engagement with the private companies working in this sector. We are currently seeing declining numbers of drivers opting to take their driving tests in manual vehicles as the number of electric vehicles increases each year – I wonder how long it will be before autonomous vehicles replace driving tests altogether.
At Reddie & Grose we work with clients at the forefront of innovation and 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. Please get in contact if you would like any further information.
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.
