The Following Article Was Taken From Austroads: New resource for future vehicle technology trials now online.

As a service to its members, industry and the wider community, Austroads has published a set of curated lessons learned from Connected Vehicle, Automated Vehicle and Low Emission Vehicle trial projects.

To help prepare for the impact of future vehicles and technologies on the road transport system, Austroads’ members and private industry have engaged in technologies trials right around Australia and New Zealand.

Each trial has offered lessons to be learned, but with trials being conducted right across Australia and New Zealand, it can be hard to know where to look.

The collection of detailed case studies is designed to capture lessons learned about the trials, allowing agencies to better focus their research investment and inform policy and strategy decisions.

Vibeke Matthews, Austroads acting Future Vehicles and Technology Program Manager, said the online resource will expand over time and capture some of the ground-breaking work undertaken in Australia and New Zealand.

“The Future Vehicles and Technology Program purpose is to support our member organisations to deliver an improved road transport network that leverages the benefits of emerging technologies while minimising some of the risks inevitably faced during a period of such rapid change.”

“Each case study details the project objectives and findings along with links to reports and websites to find further information.  They also include the technologies used in the trial, the types of locations, the scale and the project stage,” Vibeke said.

An example of the projects featured is the Ipswich Connected Vehicle Pilot, Australia’s largest on-road pilot of connected vehicles and infrastructure, which is being led by the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads.

The project is testing connected vehicle technology, also known as Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS). C-ITS enables vehicles to talk to other connected vehicles, roadside infrastructure, and centralised traffic management systems to share awareness messages.

The trial has retrofitted the vehicles of 350 public participants with C-ITS equipment including a vehicle station, a roof rack with an antenna and a display tablet mounted to the windscreen. It has also fitted 30 traffic lights with C-ITS equipment (roadside stations) and developed a 300 square kilometre cloud service (central station) to support the provision of C-ITS messages direct to vehicles.

The messages include advanced red-light warning, road hazard warning, back-of-queue, turning warning for vulnerable road users and road works warning. Speed limits are also provided – referred to as in-vehicle speed.

After 20,000 km of on-road testing prior to the pilot go-live, and over 1 million km and growing of on-road driving from participants, new learnings continue to emerge, demonstrating both the importance of large scale pilots and the value of making these lessons easily accessible to others.

Explore the trials online https://austroads.com.au/drivers-and-vehicles/future-vehicles-and-technology/trials

Austroads is planning a webinar to introduce the new online case studies of future vehicle technology trials and highlight two of the trial projects. Register your interest and we’ll email you when the details have been finalised.

Have a comment? Leave a reply