A new report from the Transport Committee argues that full adoption of connected or driverless cars could be 30 years away.

Findings released as part of the Committee’s ‘Motoring of the Future’ report suggested that the Department for Transport (DfT) needed to "devise a range of fiscal and other incentives" to boost take-up of autonomous and connected vehicles, in the same way incentives have been used to increase adoption of low emission vehicles.

However, due to the high expense of connected vehicles, the Committee expected that for a long time connected vehicles might run alongside manual vehicles, as market take-up would be gradual.

"New technologies tend to be introduced at the top end of the market, and it might take 20 to 30 years for such technologies to percolate through the entire vehicle fleet."

The report incorporated testimony from industry experts, who differed on precisely how far away connected and autonomous cars might be. Professor John Miles of Cambridge University argued that small technological advances, such as automatic parking, lane change control and anti-collision systems, meant that autonomous vehicles are closer people generally believe.

By contrast, Professor Oliver Carsten of the University of Leeds commented that "real entry into the market will almost certainly not be as rapid as the optimists have predicted".

The report accordingly urged the Department for Transport to prepare for a cross-over period where new technologies would run alongside old.

"For the next 30 years, manual, semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles are all likely to run on UK roads."

Paul Newman of the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, suggested that demand for the technologies would primarily have to come from motorists, but commented that the potential for their use was huge.

"Computing changes it all, and computing has not changed transport much at all yet. If you look at what computing has done to telephones, media and finance, you will see that in cars and vehicles, and they will be better because of computing."