Safety. Although the UK has a good record for safety, there are still around 3,500 deaths/year, and 40,000 injuries. Advanced, sophisticated systems capable of monitoring the environment and interacting with driver and vehicle control can make a major contribution to the reduction of accidents and their mitigating effects.

Mobility (and congestion). With more than 27M vehicles on UK roads and rising, congestion is increasing with consequent impact on ease of mobility. Telematics will contribute towards systems which can ease congestion through communication with the road infrastructure and via fiscal or other measures, change travel patterns.

Security. Vehicle crime is an escalating issue for both passenger car and commercial vehicles. Improvement to vehicle security systems are leading increasingly to persons being the target of the crime in order to gain unauthorised access to vehicles. Intelligent security systems based on driver recognition have the potential to minimise such occurrences. The potential use of vehicles in terrorist activity is a recent concern.

The adverse economic effects of congestion will benefit from ASSET technology developments. Currently, cost effectiveness of systems are difficult to justify on all except premium vehicles, therefore rapid cost reduction of critical components and widening their scope of applicability is required, allowing for migration to a wider range of vehicles and increased take-up of the technology.

The requirement to reduce fuel consumption and emissions of CO2 and harmful substances will benefit from more freely flowing traffic. ASSET technology for traffic flow control can help improve overall fuel consumption and has the potential to reduce local pollution build up in urban areas.

Rapidly increasing performance of information technology (electronics, software and communications) is improving the likelihood of ready and extensive application in vehicles. Because the technology is evolving so rapidly, matching product lifecycles to vehicle evolution needs careful management. Additionally, the pace of development is so fast that new possibilities become apparent continuously leading to a need for continuous reassessment of future capabilities. Modular manufacture and dealer configuration will aid assimilation of such developments.

UK Government, European and International policy concerning transport regulation and legislation has a major impact on the performance requirements of ASSET systems. These cover congestion, energy, CO2 and other emissions, health & safety and waste management. There are significant implications for system integrity and reliability for use in safety related technologies.

There is a growing awareness that achievement of safety and congestion goals will require more than autonomous systems, dependent only upon what is available within each vehicle. Effectiveness will depend upon sharing information between vehicles as well as with infrastructure based information. This requires the eventual emergence of a coordinated infrastructure and vehicle system development strategy based on an acceptable business model for uptake of telematic technologies.