This is one of the driverless shuttle vehicles people will be able to use in Milton Keynes by this autumn

Milton Keynes is set to be one of the world’s leading Smart Cities with the introduction of driverless shuttle vehicles as early as this October.

The city council and its partners have successfully secured almost £2m in grant funding to deliver new state of the art self-driving vehicles.

The StreetCAV project vehicles will range from tiny one seaters up to the size of buses. More details of expected routes will be published in the coming months, says the council, but is expected most of them will be around Central Milton Keynes.

MK has been chosen to trial them all before rolling out the scheme to the rest of the country. The funding comes from a government pot of £18.5 million being made available to projects that will strengthen the UK’s automated supply chain.

A council spokesperson said today (Tuesday): “Passengers will be able to use the self-driving shuttles from as early as October 2024.”

Meanwhile the council and The Open University are getting prepared by teaming up to promote MK as one of the world’s leading smart cities through the MK:Smart initiative.

And they have this week launched a special new MK Smart website to keep people informed of the high tech happenings.

Led by the OU and involving more than 20 organisations, MK:Smart began 10 years ago to introduce large scale technology trials to Milton Keynes, with specific work into sustainable transport, energy use and water consumption.

It saw Milton Keynes becoming the first UK place to trial a driverless car and laid the foundations for robots on city streets, plus many more innovations. The project was partly funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England.

MK:Smart as a project officially ended in 2017, although high tech research projects continue today in the city. These include delivery drones that could revolutionise the supply of emergency medicines, and the city developing its own dedicated 5G network solely for research use,

Now the partners are returning to MK:Smart to remind the academic and business community that Milton Keynes is a brilliant place to run ‘living laboratory’ tests and trials.

The new website will be a home page for information on all things Smart City in Milton Keynes, building on the legacy the original MK:Smart project.

The council’s Cabinet member for Innovation, Cllr Shanika Mahendran, said: “Over the last ten years Milton Keynes has welcomed academics, city leaders and businesses from around the world as they seek new solutions for green and modern cities. We rightly have an incredible international reputation as the home of innovation and as a place that enables large scale trials... We’re delighted to revive our partnership with the OU and find new projects that keep us at the forefront of innovation.”

Professor Enrico Motta from The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute, said: “Ten years after the launch of the original MK:Smart project, it is exciting to see the OU and MK City Council renewing their partnership to progress the Smart City agenda in Milton Keynes and contribute to tackling major societal challenges. I am very much looking forward to the next developments in this collaboration.”