Citizens’ Autonomous Vehicle Observatory project wins funding

A new project tracking how Londoners are experiencing the arrival of self-driving taxis has been awarded funding through the HEIF Social Science Impact Fund for 2026-2027 within the University of Cambridge. The Citizens’ Autonomous Vehicle Observatory (CAVO), led by CFI Associate Director Dr Maya Indira Ganesh, will build a public dashboard capturing citizen voice on the safety, accountability, and everyday disruption of autonomous vehicle (AV) trials and channel it directly into regulatory debate. The timing could hardly be sharper. Last week, Uber and the British AI firm Wayve launched London’s first self-driving taxi service, with a small fleet of autonomous Ford Mustang Mach-Es now live on the Uber app still carrying a human safety driver, but marking what both companies are calling a milestone in bringing robotaxis to the capital. The BBC’s technology editor, among the first UK journalists to take a ride, described a mostly smooth trip in which the safety driver nonetheless had to intervene once, a reminder that regulators and the public alike still face open questions about how these vehicles behave on unpredictable city streets. “That is precisely the gap the CAVO is designed to address, Dr Ganesh says. “Global trials suggest AVs are statistically safer than human driving, but safety has so far been assessed in terms of road safety rules, legal liability and engineering benchmarks. ‘Safety’ means different things for different communities and not all tech users are the same. The elderly, parents, disabled residents, children, unhoused people, delivery riders, and taxi drivers are all likely to understand safety differently, as they do in the public space of the street.” As trials expand across London, CAVO will hold open public workshops to gather these accounts and translate them into a dashboard that can be cited by journalists, watchdog groups, and the local authorities now grappling with how to regulate the technology. The project, set to launch in October, brings together a well-placed set of partners: Careful Industries, the inclusive-innovation studio building the dashboard; DG Cities, which has already been researching community responses to driverless trials in London; and Professor Jack Stilgoe of University College London, who ran the ESRC Driverless Futures project and an international expert on self-driving vehicles. Together they give CAVO a direct line into the regulatory conversations now shaping AV policy nationally, and the communities who will, in theory, be served by the cars. The project builds on Dr Ganesh’s work on the multi-city collaborative public engagement project on AI in the Streets, and her book, Auto-correct, which maps the ethical debates about autonomous vehicles. The CAVO offers a mechanism for the public whose streets are being reshaped by this technology to be heard on their own terms. Image credit: Elise Racine / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/