The unassuming Nottinghamshire airfield where researchers test self-driving cars

Like it or not, the roads of the future are going to include driverless cars.

But if one day you do step into an automated vehicle, there’s a strong chance it will have been safety-tested here in Notts.

That’s the job of a team of automotive risk assessors based at Retford Gamston Airport in north Nottinghamshire.

The Gamston Research Centre, run by Thatcham Research, is where emerging assisted, automated, and electric vehicle (EV) technology gets put through a barrage of testing.

One day they might be testing a driverless vehicle’s ability to stop for a crossing cyclist, the next, the reliability of new EV tech, or how secure a car is from theft. And the site they operate is one of the most cutting edge in the UK.

So that if you go out to the airport today, you might find strangely familiar yet unfamiliar scenes: cyclists sharing roads with cars, children crossing a road.

The only difference is that the people are all dummies - crash test dummies, albeit of a more advanced kind.

The team tests a whole range of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV), generating invaluable data on safety, security, and repairs for the insurance and manufacturing industries.

Assessing where the future tech is coming from, and where it’s going, is the job of Vehicle Technology Manager Tom Leggett.

He says that the testing that goes on in Gamston is among the most advanced in the UK.

“We’re lucky because Gamston is such an amazing space,” he says. “We’ve got the ability there to put the vehicle through its paces, not just on the track but on the roads as well to see how it works in the real world.

“We ask, when you take it out into the real world what does that mean? Outside of a controlled environment there are factors like weather, other vehicles, quirky features like roads. What does that mean for the tech?”

An industry that’s moving as fast as this one, driven in a large part by enormous strides in Chinese automotive manufacturing, requires safety testing and insurance to move just as fast - in fact faster, so that the tests are always one step ahead.

“Ensuring we’re one step ahead of the tech, that’s my role,” says Leggett.

“New Chinese brands, new types of connectivity and automation, what does that mean for insurers and drivers? One of our aims is to make manufacturers consider insurance more when they design their vehicles.”

The team at Gamston doesn’t just assess vehicles based on their safety features - such as their ability to recognise hazards in their path - but also tests how secure a car might be from theft and, increasingly, cybercrime.

As Leggett explains: “We have a wide variety of targets that we can drive a vehicle at, using a foam car on a robotic platform. We have special lanes to replicate a three lane motorway.

“We can replicate the radar signature and look of a small vehicle, to try to prevent a crash from happening altogether.

“We can replicate advanced manoeuvres such as turning across a path at high speeds, then breaking to see how a test vehicle might react.

“There’s a pedestrian model that can walk across the car at lower speeds, a cyclist, with very different visuals in terms of how the vehicle might be able to test them. There are 20-30 different scenarios.”

Based in Berkshire but with its key test centre at Gamston, Thatcham Research started out in 1969 as a non-profit safety research centre for the motor industry.

Today it remains not-for-profit, and holds the title of the only one of its kind in UK automotive risk intelligence.

Thatcham produces its own unique rating for automotive technology, the New Vehicle Security Assessment (NVSA), which is recognised as the safety and security standard in the automotive insurance industry.

And while the company is based in the UK, thanks to international initiatives such as the European New Car Assessment Programme (NCAP), it is influential in the field of vehicle insurance and testing far beyond Britain.

At the moment Thatcham is focused mainly on vehicles that are already out there on the roads, or the very next generation.

But with billions worldwide being invested in making driverless - automated - cars safe and commercially viable, Leggett is conscious that they’re going to stay on the agenda.

“We focus on the tech that’s available to customers now, which is assisted, not automated,” he says. “We are very much testing cars that you can buy in the forecourt.

“However we do a lot of work in the automated vehicle space. Automated vehicles are absolutely massive in their potential, but it might be a few years before we see them on the road in a mass scale.”