Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) (www.jaguarlandrover.com) has announced details of a Range Rover Sport fitted with prototype technology that enables the vehicle to operate autonomously through a city, obeying traffic lights as well as negotiating T-junctions and roundabouts.

This research technology, called Autonomous Urban Drive, has been designed and developed in the UK, and it is a step closer to achieving ‘level four’ autonomy in JLR’s future vehicles within the next decade.

Level four autonomous vehicles are designed to carry out the entire driving task for specific environments — such as towns and cities — without any driver intervention. Using Autonomous Urban Drive prototype technology, passengers can select a location and the Range Rover Sport research vehicle will decide the best route.

JLR is developing both fully and semi-autonomous vehicle technologies, to offer customers the choice of an engaged or autonomous drive while maintaining an enjoyable and safe driving experience.

The company’s vision is to make the autonomous car viable in the widest range of real-life on- and off-road driving environments — and weathers.

Autonomous Urban Drive is being demonstrated as part of the £20 million UK Autodrive research and development project. The first set of trials on public roads is due in Milton Keynes and Coventry by the end of this year.

These will initially take place on closed roads, before evolving into open-road trials and demonstrations as the project draws to a close in summer 2018.