The shortest month of the year has lived up to expectations and flown by at record pace. Despite the relentless nature of lockdown, time really does seem to have flown and it’s been nearly a year now since the full team was together in our Greenwich office.

But, as they say, the show must go on and we have been working at pace over the past month across various project and client work.

We talked last month about Project D-RISK, where we’re not only undertaking public engagement work to understand peoples views and attitudes around autonomous vehicles, but also crowdsourcing additional driving “edge cases” (rarely occurring driving scenarios).  All of which is supporting the broader aim of the project to better “train” AVs to be able to safely manage a broader range of driving scenarios, helping to build public trust.  

February was another busy month for us on the project as we continued to promote our survey and had more in-depth discussions with the public through focus groups.  Our public survey closed at the end of the month and we have had a fantastic response, with over 1,000 survey responses and some truly unique edge cases captured.  Ed, our Head of Research & Service Design is in the midst of reviewing the data and building out an analysis plan to ensure we can report robust findings.  Look out for more insights from the survey over the coming months.

We also ran our first virtual focus groups, using Miro.  Obviously normally we would have done these face to face but with continuing COVID restrictions we got creative to build engaging digital sessions that were interactive, accessible and still delivered us valuable insights.   During the sessions, we explored perceptions and confidence in AVs today as well as showing participants various human and AV driving simulations and exploring responses.  

Continuing the AV theme, the team has also been busy working on all things Project Endeavour.  Kim, our Head of Smart Mobility, is leading the work we’re doing here to support local authorities; you can see more about the tools and assets we’re creating here. And it’s not just local authorities we’re engaging with, we also want to make sure the public have their say, with their views and requirements being fed into the design of AV ridesharing services.  In order to capture those insights we launched a new user survey, which you can complete here.  Our last survey work for the project was back in 2019 so this will provide us with a fascinating dataset to explore how the pandemic may have altered people’s attitudes towards AV ridesharing services.

Moving from AVs to EVs, we also received fleet telematics datasets from the Royal Borough of Greenwich this month, in relation to the work we’re doing with them for the Birchmere project.  This piece of work has been focused on helping the council electrify their fleet and navigating the challenges at their depot around space and grid capacity.  Through analysis of the telematics we've been able to demonstrate that it will be possible to meet some of the charging requirements of the borough's fleet away from the depot, when drivers are out and about undertaking their daily tasks.  This is a key finding as it can reduce the total electricity requirements at the depot, reducing CapEx costs.

Other recent highlights:

·       Some very exciting conversations, internally, with consortium partners and with external parties, about ways to future engage the public with the D-RISK project

·       Meeting with over 35 community leaders from the Royal Borough of Greenwich as part of a new project – more details to follow soon

·       Running a workshop with students from Imperial College London to explore opportunities for the future of logistics

·       And finally….to see us through what we hope will be the final months of lockdown, we formed the DGC Book & Film Club this month.  We anticipate fully exhausting the entire Netflix catalogue by June 12! 

Top thing we learned this month

· That AVs may not respond well to sea foam!  News that sea foam has showered the village of Bonmahon in County Waterford, in the Republic of Ireland, presented the perfect “edge case” for project D-RISK.

This is only a handful of the things we’re working on at the moment – stay tuned for blog posts coming up to find out more.