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A vision of the not so distant future. Two-seater driverless pods transporting you and I from
A to B. A being a train station and B being a nearby shopping centre. Becoming operational
in the grid-based town of Milton Keynes, an environment arguably perfectly structured
to test out the new autonomous vehicles. The idea is that while it drives, you can catch
up on your emails, the news and games. You'll travel at a leisurely 12 miles per hour. Each
journey will cost you two pounds. And it's estimated there will be one million pounds
of revenue generated in the first year. The pods from the firm that installed laser guided
ones at Heathrow Airport, but will be different using GPS, high definition cameras, sensors
and will travel on separate lanes to avoid hitting pedestrians.
They will have steering wheels or joysticks if passengers feed the need to take control.
The technology is similar to other self-driving cars such as Google's, which it has introduced
in California. Demonstrated here by Steve Mahan - who has lost 95 per cent of his sight.
The 20 trial pods are due to start running from 2015 but the Government reckons 100 of
them could be ferrying people back and forth by 2017.