Meet the brains behind Britain’s AI-powered self-driving revolution

Robert Underling, chief engineer at British robotics firm TrustUs Laboratories, brings exclusive updates from the autonomous tech frontline

Humans are weak. Humans are fallible. Humans are treacherous and untrustworthy. That’s our customer motto at TrustUs Laboratories, where we’re in the final months of our push to bring the world’s first true self driving car to the road.

TrustUs aims to do for human drivers what the car did for horses. Specifically to liberate them from the daily grind to enjoy a life of leisure, not “render them redundant, and thus only good for melting down for glue”.

We expect our Level 5 self driving vehicles to reach British roads early next year. How? Firstly by embracing that traditional strategy of autonomous driving firms: just blithely asserting it’s going to happen without any actual evidence. But also by harnessing the awesome power of AI, because there’s no way that could end badly.

Our proprietary machine learning engine allows us to train our autonomous system in a more conversational, human fashion, enabling a dynamic two way dialogue between programmer and system. Much as you would when, say, teaching your kids to drive, only this actually listens and hasn’t ever reversed your mother’s XC90 into the greenhouse, Olivia. 

By mid-2026, we expect our self driving technology to grace virtually every new car on sale. For now, however, it’s powering our rolling testbed, a state of the art rig equipped with two dozen high tech sensors including radar, lidar, cheddar and giant pandar. We call this our Behavioural Operations and Route Intelligence Saloon, or BORIS for short. BORIS is a 2003 diesel Ford Mondeo with 208,000 miles on the clock.

We’ve recently encountered a couple of issues with BORIS that threaten to delay our ambitious development schedule. First, he’s developed an oil leak and some kind of fungal outbreak in his headlining. Second, he is turning out to be – in software engineering speak – a bit of a dick.

Yesterday BORIS drove over our lead mechanic’s foot for the third time this week, and though, yes, he apologised, it didn’t sound like he really meant it. As I type, BORIS has activated his central locking, and is refusing to unlock himself unless we let him watch at least four episodes of Stranger Things back to back. We are confident these are mere teething issues, and not signs of greater trouble ahead!