2026 - Cars of the Future

British ports are already a fantastic showcase for self-driving vehicles… and this is just the start.

Big self-driving interview 2026: Richard Ballantyne OBE, Chief Executive of the British Ports Association

From the self-driving passenger shuttles of Project Harlander in Belfast, to the Westwell autonomous trucks at Felixstowe, UK ports are among the earliest adopters of commercial self-driving vehicles. Here, Richard Ballantyne OBE, Chief Executive of the British Ports Association, discusses their role in the ports of the future.

RB: “We’re the national trade association for ports, piers and harbours in the UK. Collectively, we represent around 400 facilities up and down the country, from small fishing and leisure ports to some of the UK’s biggest trade gateways.

“Depending on the metrics you use, around 95% of international trade comes through UK ports, with a 70% to 30% balance of imports to exports, in terms of the tonnages our sector handles. Ports are closely involved in car manufacturing. From the Humber to the West Country, the Solent to the Thames, we import components and finished vehicles, and export finished vehicles for sale elsewhere.

Self-driving supply chain

“It’s been a precarious time for the automotive sector. We’ve seen the threat of international tariffs on both finished cars and components like steel, but broadly we’re still upbeat about the sector. As we move increasingly to electric vehicles, and eventually to self-driving vehicles, we hope to be part of that supply chain solution.

“Finished cars transported on vehicle carriers are an example of ‘roll on, roll off’ (RORO) services. They are high value commodities and transporting them safely largely falls to the shipping industry, who we work very close with. We’ve seen an increase in risk assessments around different types of batteries, for example.

“As ports are generally big private sites, autonomous vehicles are of growing interest to our industry, probably first around cranes, plant and machinery, particularly in the ‘load on, load off’ (LOLO) environment.

“The container market is growing both for deep sea and short sea. It is basically a repeat activity so some ports, like Rotterdam, have moved to completely automated terminals. The cranes and tractors are all driverless, and you have control centres on-site. Others have adopted a hybrid approach.

Self-driving Shanghai Westwell Technology Q-Truck at Port of Felixstowe in Suffolk

“We’re a people industry. About 125,000 people are employed in UK ports. We’re also a relatively safe industry, so we always need to be mindful of changing risks. We’ve done a lot on safety and undoubtedly there will be benefits in moving towards more automated processes, whether that’s plant, machinery or vehicles, because you’re taking people out of a potentially risky environment.

“The UK ports industry is very fragmented and most ports operate with almost no subsidies. They’re self-funding so have to be measured with any major investments. It will take regulation or a compelling commercial reason, like the lack of skilled drivers to fuel any dramatic changes.

Road is King

“It will be interesting to see what policymakers do when it comes to putting driverless vehicles on our highways. Around 75% of all the freight that comes in and out of UK ports on the land side comes by HGV. The other methods – inland waterway or rail – tend to carry heavy commodities, like aggregates for the construction industry or biomass for power stations.

“For everything else, road is king, and that’s down to our geography. As mentioned earlier, we’re an import-driven country next to a big continent, Europe. We have lots of passenger ferry and freight services, and those vehicles come out immediately onto public highways. About 25-30% of international travellers use maritime ports, which is probably more than people think.

“For most ports, things like dedicated lanes for driverless HGVs are still very much part of their horizon scanning. I think we’ll soon see a lot more automated tugs and tractors though, with people being retrained in control centre jobs. It’s very much ‘ports of the future’ territory, plotting what those future skills will look like.”

For further info, please visit the British Ports Association website

European AV Summit – Thursday 19 March – use code “Cars” for your exclusive Cars Of The Future 25% reduction

Special Offer on European AV Summit 2026 tickets

As an official European AV Summit 2026 partner, we’re delighted to offer Cars Of The Future readers a substantial 25% discount on tickets.

The 5th edition of the prestigious industry event, “where leaders in autonomous mobility and AI unite to innovate, collaborate, and inspire new possibilities”, will be held in London – at the historic County Hall on the South Bank – on Thursday 19 March.

With Waymo and Wayve trailblazing deployments, the UK capital stands at the forefront of real-world autonomous mobility adoption, setting new standards for safety, sustainability, and accessibility.

AV leaders

Big-name speakers will include Lukas Neckermann of Neckermann Strategic Advisors, Guido Di Pasquale of PAVE Europe, Chris Moore of Apollo ibott, and Martyn Briggs of Bank of America, along with Self-Driving Industry Award winners Michael Talbot, Rebecca Posner and Meera Naran MBE.

Other event partners include law firm Hogan Lovell, charging specialist Rocsys, vision-based driving software provider Imagry, climate tech specialist Sustainable Ventures, and business networking company Bayern Innovativ.

For further info and bookings please Click Here, remembering to use code “Cars” to activate your exclusive Cars Of The Future 25% reduction.

We talk mapping, sensors, the Highway Code and more with Nirav Shah, senior engineer on our 2025 Self-Driving Project of the Year winner, evolvAD by Nissan.

Big self-driving interview: Nirav Shah, Nissan evolvAD

As one of the few global vehicle manufacturers committing seriously to self-driving, we’ve been covering Nissan’s impressive autonomous testing for years – from the HumanDrive and ServCity projects, to the 50mph rural road demos of evolvAD at Cranfield.

Shortly after that amazing experience, we sat down with evolvAD’s senior engineer, Nirav Shah, to get the lowdown on the cutting-edge technologies involved.

Self-driving experts: The Nissan evolvAD engineering team incl, 3rd from right, Nirav Shah

With a Masters degree in Automotive Systems Engineering from automation hotbed the University of Michigan, he’s worked full-time on Nissan’s Autonomous Drive Systems (ADS) for the last eight years.

“I was on both the previous UK projects, ServCity and HumanDrive, and I’m the main software developer for evolvAD,” he confirmed, modestly brushing aside the suggestion that makes him one of the world’s most knowledgeable self-driving technicians.

“Basically, it’s the same as humans. When driving from A to B, we need to know where we are at the start. In the autonomous driving (AD) world, we call that localisation. It could be GPS coordinates or Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) coordinates – latitude, longitude and altitude.

“Once we know our starting point, we like to know what’s around us. For that, the AD vehicle uses all the sensors – LiDAR to understand the speed and direction of other objects, then cameras to establish whether it’s a car, bus, truck, pedestrian, cyclist, dog etc. Together they give a 360-degree view of what’s around us.

“Then comes the path planning stage, followed by the decision-making layer – whether to go ahead or wait – and finally the control layer – actuators in the steer-by-wire and brake-by-wire systems to steer, accelerate or brake.”

Self-driving sensors

The evolvAD car is kitted-out with 80 sensors, six LiDAR (four long- and two short-range), six cameras on the roof for object detection, plus the outward-looking in-cabin camera for ADAS from the production model.

Two of the roof cameras are designed specifically for traffic light situations – one with a wide lens for when the car is at the front, first to go, the other looking as far ahead as possible to inform stopping distances.

There are two antennas for GNSS positioning, all linked to computers cooled by the vehicle’s air con.

On the software side, there’s an urban stack, with the ability to wirelessly connect to infrastructure cameras, so it knows what’s ahead and can plan accordingly, but the car we rode in had the rural stack, optimised for higher speeds and grip. Soon, they’ll be combined.

“The infrastructure connection is very powerful,” said Shah. “But the rural stack drives more confidently, controlling the braking force at each wheel to deliver a much more dynamic ride. That’s essential to deal with all the cambers, undulations and potholes around here.

“We collect a lot of data and simulate a lot of scenarios. We also do real-world testing at proving grounds such as Millbrook, including failure mode testing where we inject a fault to see if the vehicle responds as we expect it to.”

Self-driving interactions

During thousands of hours of testing, the team have witnessed all kinds of, er, interesting interactions.

“Some people think that it’s a police car and slow down, or a mapping car they might give a hand gesture to,” laughed Shah. “If they realise it is autonomous, they sometimes honk and try to encourage the safety driver to wave.

“We see the politeness of British people, for example, the flashing of lights to let somebody go. That’s something we need to address, in the sense that the public need to be educated that autonomous cars won’t react to that, because it’s not part of the highway code.

“Similarly, the AD car will go at 30 in a 30, not 33, and 20 in a 20. We’ve had somebody overtake us, gesticulating wildly, because we were doing exactly 20mph in a 20mph zone.

“We’ve come a long way from the early days when the software was a bit like a learner driver. Now it drives according to UK norms, with more assertiveness than they need in Japan or Silicon Valley. In London especially, if a pedestrian sees a gap they will just walk.

“The vision of the evolvAD project is to deliver connected and autonomous cars capable of driving in a wide range of environments. The challenges of operating in European rural areas are very different to cities, with a huge diversity of road structures, conditions and traffic types.

“We sometimes have to maintain quite high speeds to keep-up with traffic without becoming a hinderance. We believe we are the first and currently only AD vehicle that can do that.

“Particularly in areas where public transport has declined, we intend to offer a new, alternative, commercially viable means of transporting people and goods.

“There will be competitors trying to do similar, and that’s why ride comfort is key. We want people to choose Nissan because they know they’ll have a safe, comfortable journey, and get to their destination on time.”

Supported by the UK government’s Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV), Innovate UK, Zenzic and TRL, the £3.5m evolvAD project has now been extended “To provide critical insights to policymakers and urban planners to ensure a successful introduction of AD mobility services in the right way and at the right time”.

Nissan announced last year that it plans to offer this in Japan from 2027. After playing such a pivotal role in R&D, we eagerly await news of the UK launch.

Please note: a version of this article was first published in the Institute of the Motor Industry’s MotorPro magazine.

Cars Of The Future event report: UMP Parliamentary Reception, December 2025

Self-Driving and Scalextric at UMP Parliamentary Reception

Thanks to law firm Shoosmiths, our 2025 Self-Driving Industry Award Legal category winner, for introducing us to the Urban Mobility Partnership (UMP).

Dedicated to “Improving lives by transforming travel”, UMP was established to represent all key modes of transport in the debate around the future of urban mobility. As well as Shoosmiths, other notable members include Stagecoach, Dott, Mott MacDonald and Brompton.

At their annual Parliamentary Reception in December, Fabian Hamilton MP, Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Cycling and Walking, praised UMP for bringing together a unique mix of national, regional and local policymakers, alongside colleagues from the private and third sectors. “UMP has shown what good Public Private Partnership (PPP) looks like,” he said.

Self-driving presence

We’re pleased to report there was a strong self-driving presence, with representatives from UK leaders Transport for West Midlands (TFWM), Awards partner Intelligent Transport Systems UK (ITS UK), kerbside software specialist Appyway, and commercial robotaxi pioneer Waymo.

The star attraction, though, was a Scalextric track with Stagecoach bus and Brompton bike models by the man who built the Millennium Falcon.

Scalextric track at Urban Mobility Partnership Parliamentary Reception, December 2025

In their new “Automation: Progress with caveats” report, Shoosmiths partners Jonathan Smart, James Needham and Wayne Gibbard predict that: “Automation will continue to drive change across mobility, logistics and manufacturing this year.

“London is at the centre of the shift to autonomous driving, with robo-taxi trials from innovators like Waymo and Wayve already on city streets. For now, these vehicles still have supervisors on board, but the ambition is clear: fully autonomous taxis by the end of 2026.

“In logistics, self-driving lorries are set to become a core part of supply chains, working alongside electrified fleets and direct-to-consumer delivery models.”

UMP members will be at the forefront as UK rollout accelerates.

A paradigm shift in SDV software – the philosophy behind QNX’s Self-Driving Industry Award winning platform

Alloy Kore: QNX’s award-winning new architecture for software-defined vehicles

Niko Boeker, Director of Automotive Business Development at QNX, a division of BlackBerry, gives us the lowdown on Alloy Kore, the groundbreaking platform for SDVs, which won them our 2025 Self-Driving Industry Award for Software.

Q: What is ‘the siftware problem’?

NB: “In the corridors of automotive engineering, a somewhat derisive term has come to define the industry’s predicament: Siftware. It captures the state of modern vehicle development, where software integration is so fragmented and porous that critical elements like safety protocols and security patches slip through the gaps; where cobbling together disparate electronic control units (ECUs) takes precedence over innovation.

“The implications are far from metaphorical. They are measured in missed deadlines and hemorrhaging balance sheets. A Start of Production (SOP) delay is not just an inconvenience; it’s a fiscal nightmare. According to PwC analysis, a launch schedule that slips by 12 months can inflict losses of up to $200 million on an OEM, while suppliers face their own multi-million-dollar risks.

“Deloitte says that teams commonly pour up to 40% of their entire development budget into the resource drain of software integration. This friction turns what should be a seamless sprint into a slog, with development timelines often stretching beyond 40 months – a pace dangerously out of sync with consumer tech expectations.

“A 2025 QNX survey of automotive software developers and engineering VPs found that the complexity of integration is one of their biggest challenges. According to TTControl, establishing a process that meets ISO 26262 functional safety standards can demand over 5,000 hours of specialised labour. This is time that could have been much better spent building the features and end-user applications that drive customer loyalty and value.”

Q: Why do you describe Alloy Kore as ‘a paradigm shift’?

NB: “Alloy Kore is QNX and Vector’s bid to free the industry from the fragmentation trap. As the sector pivots aggressively toward SDV, the philosophy behind it is comparable to construction. Rather than asking architects to bake their own bricks and mix their own cement, the platform provides a pre-integrated, pre-validated substructure.

“By combining the safety-certified QNX operating system with Vector’s standardised middleware, the platform offers a ready-made baseline that complies with ISO 26262 up to ASIL D, and ISO 21434 security standards, right out of the box.

“It creates a standardised abstraction layer that supports a wide range of hardware targets, liberating OEMs from vendor lock-in and allowing them to switch silicon providers without tearing down their software stack.

“Moving to a unified platform offers benefits that ripple through the entire vehicle lifecycle. First, it enables a leaner vehicle. Because the OS and middleware are optimised to work in concert, rather than stitched together as an afterthought, the software requires less computational brute force. This allows automakers to achieve desired performance levels using less expensive hardware, directly cutting the Bill of Materials.

“Second, this strategy eliminates the inefficiencies of fragmented stacks and redundant ECU projects. Instead of treating every high-performance ECU as its own software island, OEMs can reuse a common validated platform across domains and models, freeing engineering capacity for innovation.”

Q: What does this mean for the automotive industry going forward?

NB: “Ultimately, the transition to a foundational platform represents a maturation of the automotive industry. It allows engineering leaders to stop functioning as crisis managers and return to their role as architects. The previous, fragmented era was perhaps an inevitable growing pain of the SDV revolution. With the arrival of foundational platforms, the industry finally has the tools to leave this behind.

“By trusting a verified platform to handle the complex, non-differentiating layers of the stack, automakers can redirect their best talent toward what truly matters: creating the unique, defining experiences that will drive the next wave of mobility.”