Autonomous vehicle trial will involve multiple vehicles and the most sophisticated levels of connectivity.
Based on urban and motorway routes, a fleet of fully autonomous vehicles will ultimately be making the journey from London to Oxford - about from 60 miles from the centre of the UK capital.
The vehicles will be operating at Level 4 autonomy, which means the entire trip can be made without any passengers on board, performing all the safety and road monitoring functions entirely automatically.
Run by the DRIVEN consortium of transport, IT, local government and communications organisations, the trial will last almost three years and will test all aspects of the autonomous vehicle concept, from data sharing and inter-vehicle communication, to insurance models and cybersecurity.
Amongst the companies involved are Transport for London, Nominet, TRL and the UK Atomic Energy Authority's RACE and is led by Oxbotica.
According to Professor Paul Newman, head of the Oxford Robotics Institute at the Oxford University: “DRIVEN is the first of its kind and brings a host of new questions surrounding the way these vehicles will communicate with each other.
He added: “We’re moving from the singleton autonomous vehicle, to fleets of autonomous vehicles – and what’s interesting to us at the Oxford Robotics Institute is what data the vehicles share with one another, when, and why.”