Redesigning aeroplanes. The Passenger Pod hurtling people through tunnels. Yes yeah woo and fancy a flying car . Coventry was once the heart of british automotive manufacturing, dubbed britains motor city. But its moved with the times. Now hosting the Institute For Future Transport and cities at coventry university, playing an important part in the future of autonomous, sustainable and connected transport. And in a city where the first ever british car was manufactured, research has moved to the next evolution of the automobile the autonomous vehicle. For a few years now, weve been told that Driverless Cars are just around the corner. And on this programme, weve taken a few for a spin. But before they can truly become a reality, we need to know that we can trust them just as much, if not more, than a human driver. And if this driverless world comes about, it will be transformative not just for the drivers, but also for the cities, so we may need to rethink some of the basics. Were used to a lot of congestion on our roads but it seems here like this model of autonomous vehicles seems to actually overcome some of that congestion. So we know that people spend a lot of time driving around cities, creating congestion, looking for a parking space. With fully autonomous parking, you need fewer spaces. So that will reduce the requirement in infrastructure and in cities for the Real Estate needed for parking solutions. The vehicle will literally drive itself into a car park, find its spot, recognise the white lines and pull in and park itself. Clearly, the technology has come a long way, but before our streets can be filled with autonomous vehicles, the companies need to figure out how to train them and we as a Society Need to be confident with the rules and the choices that we allow them to make. Zoe kleinman� s been Finding Out more. This is what we were promised. I took a ride in this truly driverless car from russia around the streets of Las Vegas last year. It was both terrifying and weirdly underwhelming. Turns out the car was a much more sensible driver than most humans i know. It took me three attempts to pass my Driving Test None of it was my fault, obviously but perhaps i should have come here to cambridge, where the Tech Firm five has developed a sort of Driving School for Driverless Cars. Five runs endless simulations to ensure that driverless Car Tech responds safely to challenges On The Roads. One small scenario has nearly 500,000 possible variations. Like me, our virtual car does not pass every test first time in the simulation. Any driver will tell you its those unusual moments On The Road that you werent expecting that pose the most danger. A kangaroo runs out in front of you. What . Its happened it prompted the Firm Drisk to created the worlds largest virtual library of edge cases. We are creating the first true Driving Test for autonomous vehicles, and the idea behind it is when autonomous vehicles are arriving in the uk, how will the government know that they are safe for Uk Streets . But getting the data to build the Library Hasnt been easy because people dont tend to report near misses. Weve had stories of people driving around roundabouts and seeing somebody take the Wrong Turn and driving along the motorway the wrong way. 0ne individual described an experience of having sheep appearing from nowhere as they were turning around a corner. This driverless car is like a bit of a hive mind. There is a fleet of them currently driving around london, clocking up hours and hours and hours of experience, which they then all use in order to make them better drivers. London based wayve doesnt actually make its own cars. Instead, it builds the brains for others. Were not going to get there by taking technology from one or two decades ago and trying to commercialise it with Brute Force and billions of dollars of capital. Things like Machine Learning this is the technology that is going to power the future. Wayve� s idea is that its Cars Record theirjourneys, share their data with a central hq and the useful bits feed into its learning and then back out to all of the vehicles with its brains in their boots. Try having a go at the moral machine a Game Set Up by mit scientists to explore how humans think Driverless Cars should react in various scenarios. Warning theyre all horrible. Oh, this isjust awful you saw examples where people were willing to sacrifice poorer people to save richer people, or heavier people to save more athletic people. What i would consider to be immoral, yeah. Fortunately, none of us is in charge of deciding who cars should kill, but thats not whats holding them back. When we think of self driving cars, its easy to forget quite how much we as humans actually do when were driving, so the future of autonomous vehicles not only relies on navigating difficult roads, but also reacting to new situations, and now potentially passing a government Driving Test. And i dont know many humans who pass their test first time. Zoe there. Now, when it comes to the future of transport, sustainability is key and thats notjust on the ground. Up in the skies, the race is on to Decarbonise Aviation. Companies are looking at different ways to be able to make Air Travel more environmentally friendly. And marc cieslak� s been looking at some of the more dramatic solutions. Heres the problem. The environment. We as a species are negatively impacting it in lots of different ways. Aviation contributes to just over 2 of global emissions. Pre pandemic, the number was predicted to rise fast. The problem with aeroplanes are those. And the fuel that they run on pollutes the environment when its made and when its used, so engineers, scientists and aerospace companies are looking at ways of cleaning up the stuff that comes out of those. If were going to allow people to keep on travelling, then were going to have to make aircraft which are far more efficient. And so there will be a real pressure to develop technologies, new shapes of aircraft, new Propulsion Systems that fundamentally reduce the Fuel Burn of aircraft. Here at the university of cambridge� s whittle laboratory, they specialise in work relating to turbomachinery. There are several projects and technologies being developed here that are considering sustainability and new methods of powering aircraft. Theres a wide variety of different projects under way encompassing different kinds of aircraft, from new engines and components for big commercial airliners to projects like this one testing out the efficiency of distributing lots of electrically powered propellers across an aircrafts wing. So one of the advantages of electric propulsion is that rather than having one or two largejet engines, you could have many smaller electric motors powering the aircraft and they have a very similar efficiency, whether they are very small or very large, so we might see aircraft with maybe a dozen propellers in front of them and that allows us to design smaller wings and more efficient wings. Solutions like this have potential for smaller, lower range aircraft, but for bigger aeroplanes with longer range, the Look And Design of the outside and inside of these airliners that were all familiar with could change, leading us to designs like this one the blended wing. Concepts like this offer big advantages in terms of Saving Fuel Due to the aircrafts shape, generating large amounts of lift. They also reduce noise as a result of the engines being mounted above the wing. And more recently, there are blended wing concepts exploring hydrogen as a Fuel Source that produces zero harmful emissions. But these radical designs, like the blended wing, come with their own issues. The technology is very important but its getting the infrastructure to go with that technology which would radically change on the Airport Level as well. It would change the fuel that implies an entire infrastructure to bring that fuel into the airport as well. Theyll also do away with windows for passengers. The Wing Blending into the cabin means you just cant have them. Instead, theres a suggestion that passengers will have virtual screens, which should make up for the lack of a real view. Well, thats where hybrid technologies come in aircraft which look like a conventional airliner with Gas Turbine engines on the wings but with an additional electric fan behind the tail. This is a concept known as Boundary Layer Ingestion. Now, Boundary Layer Ingestion is a technology which is aimed at taking the flow that forms over the surface of an aircraft, the flow thats on the surface is what usually forms the wake behind an aircraft and causes the drag. The idea we have is to have a fan thats wrapped around the back of the fuselage and so itjust ingests all of this parasitic flow at the back of the aircraft and takes that in and re energises it and turns it into useful thrust. Time is the enemy here, though. Aerospace is traditionally a very conservative industry. Can a significant amount of Research And Development occur in time to address the worlds urgent climate issues . So if were going to Decarbonise Aviation by 2050, then we need to get down to 1980s levels of emissions by 2030. So if youre looking at radically new concepts, you need to be able to work in a hardware rich environment, you need to be able to build and test a lot of things, because many of those ideas are going to fail. Here in bedfordshire, Blue Bear Systems Specialise In Building Uavs for commercial and military use. Theyre leading a consortium, including engineers from cambridge, in designing a Propulsion System for a small, zero emissions aircraft. The project, called inception, is part funded by the uk government. Blue bear are now testing using Flying Scale drones. This is going to produce a full size Working Project in two years. But hopefully by 2030, there will be electric aircraft which people can pay to buy a ticket and fly around on. In the future, Commercial Aircraft will undoubtedly be more environmentally friendly. But we as individuals will also need to address the impact of and the amount of flying that we all make. For many many years there has been four modes of transportation moving humans around the globe planes, trains, automobiles and boats. But now there might be another one coming into the mix. 0utside Las Vegas in the desert of nevada is the Virgin Hyperloop. This is a pod based Transport System that the company hopes will be the future of mass transit. The idea for this proposal was proposed in 2013 by Tesla And Spacex boss elon musk. The idea is quite simple put people in a pod, put that pod in a tube, and shoot that pod down the tube at the speed of an aircraft. And that is exactly what the Virgin Hyperloop is working on making reality. It goes directly to your destination, doesnt stop at every place along the way, it does that electrically, autonomously and does it inside of a tube. Click visited this spot in 2016, and frankly there wasnt much of anything to look at. Itjust sounds so radical, so groundbreaking, its hard to imagine it ever happening. In the few years since they have come quite a long way. And in november of last year they successfully completed their first passenger test. They travelled 500 metres in 15 seconds, going as fast as 107mph. Yes, yes josh was on board for the maiden voyage. It was absolutely incredible, it was surreal to be sitting inside of a hyperloop and the ride itself, you felt a little bit of acceleration, sort of like you would have in a sports car. So this is just a Beta Version of the pod. The final one is expected to be a lot bigger, think the size of a bus, but also a lot easier to get into. The full Size Pod is expected to fit around 25 people, but more importantly than that, its going to house all of the tech that makes this Hyperloop System work. Now thats important because if something breaks or goes wrong, all they have to do is remove the pod and fix it somewhere else, instead of going into the tube and potentially disrupting a lot of travel. One of the key components of Hyperloop Travel is the ability to go really, really fast. So they designed a way for the pods to levitate using opposing magnets, which in theory will help it go as fast as an aeroplane. The pods will travel in tubes about this size, and should be able to reach speeds of up to 670 mph. That is fast enough to get you from london to paris in under half an hour. The system of tubes can be built on land, over water or underground, and maybe, just maybe one day, across oceans. But building an entirely new infrastructure across a City Or Country will take a lot of work, and a lot of money. But Virgins Hyperloop System isnt the only one being developed. Underneath the streets of Las Vegas is another hyperloop tunnel, this one by the boring company yes, the one owned by elon musk. HiS System will essentially be a underground motorway. Old Tv Shows and movies may have led us to believe the future of transportation will include flying cars, but maybe the modern Day Version of that is actually a Pod Flying through a tube. That was cody. Now electric vehicles are becoming commonplace on many roads. But the problem is, youve got to charge them, and its not always as simple as wed like it to be. So how about putting down the lead and opting for a spot of wireless charging, courtesy of the road . Just think of it as being like putting your Mobile Phone on a wireless charger. The aim of this Taxi Isnt to be fully recharged, butjust to get a bit of a boost while its waiting at a Taxi Rank without any passengers. But maybe we are missing something here. Why worry about recharging the batteries, when we could just be swapping them . Stephen beckett has been to taiwan to look at some other ways electric vehicles could be powered. This is taipeis famous, or perhaps infamous, scooter waterfall. It is one of the main routes into Central Taipei for thousands of commuters every way. It is mind boggling how many mopeds there are here. Thousands of them, and theyjust keep on coming. And you know what, you really get a Sense Ofjust how much pollution these guys are probably causing. This is the same spot a few weeks later, and believe it or not a good chunk of those bikes arent producing any pollution at all. This is Publicity Stunt for gogoro, a taiwanese start up pioneering The Uptake Of Electric Scooters in taiwan. Everybody is moving into cities and living on top of each other, and the need for adopting electric transportation as a Cleaner Mode of transportation. But here comes the Problem Chicken and egg. Without the proper Infrastructure Nobody will ever adopt a Mobility Solution that is electric, because charging in these big cities are next to impossible. And this is gogoros solution to that problem. Riders own special electric bikes, but not the batteries inside them. Instead, when they are running low on power, they visit a station like this to swap out their Flat Battery and pick up a fully charged one. A subscription of around 10 30 a month gives you access to any of the 11100 Swap Stations around taiwan. Gogoro estimate their customers have saved around 80,000 tons of c02 between them thats roughly 25,000 cross the world flights. Over in San Francisco, one company has a different take on the battery swapping business. These are drive in Swapping Stations from startup ample. You just park up and within minutes a series of robots remove the empty batteries from your Vehicle And Swap in fresh ones. It is an idea that is also being championed by chinese electric Vehicle Maker nio. They plan to build 500 stations across china this year. At the moment ample� S System can swap batteries into compatible electric vehicles in under ten minutes. By The End of the year they say that will be down to just five. Quite a big difference from the hours it can take to fully charge an installed battery. Each Charging Bay is about the size of a couple of parking spaces. At the moment there are five in and around San Francisco with plans for more soon. Cities is a very tough problem. The grids are not set up to deliver a tremendous amount of charge, and so putting fast chargers can be a challenge. One thing we do is, because we can actually have the ability to slow charge the batteries and choose when we charge it. Because you separate charging batteries from putting them into the car, we can actually use renewable energy. The hope is the idea could initially be a hit with Ride Sharing and last Minute Delivery fleets who need to recharge quickly and get back On The Road. If you are a Ride Sharing driver you might spend 10 12 hours a week at a Charging Station waiting for your car to charge and earning a lot less money. Whether or not ample can convince owners and vehicle manufacturers to adopt their take on the tech, batteries like this could play a key role in addressing some of the issues hampering the but we Cant Talk about the future of transport without mentioning flying cars. The question is, are they ready to take off yet . Nick kwek� s been Finding Out. Over the years we have seen passenger drone demos, hoverboards and jetwings. 0ne Manufacturer from the netherlands though, thinks it has finally cracked it well, almost. Here it is, the Pal V liberty, on british soil. Shall we take it for a spin . Lets go. Sadly, this precise model in the uk is unable to fly. Its had its parts decommissioned. But across the North Sea i am assured it does this. Like you find in most aircraft, you have the throttle here to control the power to the engines, the joystick between my leg which controls directions, so left or right or forward or back, and the pedals which were used for driving now control the rudderfor yaw. It can carry enough fuel to fly for up to three hours. Of course on the aviation frontier, safety is a work in progress. German outfit liliums All Electric Prototype went up In Flames last year, around a month after anotherjet from an israeli start up eviation caught fire during testing. Meanwhile, boeing has pressed pause on its innovation unit, next. Backed by uber and toyota, Joby Aviation plans on bringing a flying Taxi Service to our airways. 0ther established Car Companies are piling in too. General motors has unveiled a flying Cadillac Concept and with funding from Innovate Uk and hyundai, coventry is set to receive a Pop Up Airport for the flying vehicles of tomorrow. But time is of the essence. Pal v has been going for two decades, but last summer received road certification, one of the very few in the world to do so. It is now working on Air Certification and its promising customers keys as early as next year. Similar solutions are being attempted by its rivals, or as Pal V sees them, welcome competition. That is it for our future of transport special. As ever you can keep up with the team on social media, find us on youtube, instagram, Facebook And Twitter at bbcclick. Thanks for watching and we will be back next week. Hello there. The last day of august was rather cloudy and cool with spots of drizzle across Eastern Areas. Best of any sunshine towards the west. Indeed the next few days of september are looking pretty similar, often cloudy, occasional drizzle in the east. A little bit of sunshine at times, particularly across the more sheltered Western Parts. For wednesday its a rather cloudy picture again. The thickest of The Cloud against eastern coast where we will see Light Rain or drizzle. But through the afternoon we could see quite a bit of sunshine for scotland, maybe Northern Ireland for the western fringe of wales and into the southwest. But it will be breezy across the channel. Certainly around the North Sea coast. That will take at the edge of the temperature, highs here around the mid to upper teens. Further inland a little bit warmer where you have the sunshine. Across Central Western Scotland in particular we could see temperatures reaching around 21 22 degrees. As we head through Wednesday Night it stays mostly cloudy so for england and wales, a bit of cloud continuing for Eastern Scotland then it will trundle its way eastward although some Western Parts of scotland, Northern Ireland could stay clear. It will be fairly cool under clear skies where we have The Cloud and the breeze, 11 14 degrees. Very little change for thursday and friday. An area of high pressure still sitting on top of us and bringing this North North easterly airflow. Itll bring a lot of cloud again into northern and Eastern Areas in particular. Further west that you are a better chance of seeing some sunny breaks of course, temperatures in the sunshine reaching the low 20s. Otherwise its mid to high teens in The Cloudier spots. For the weekend, signs of change with an area of high pressure begins to break down and moves eastward which allows this area of low pressure to slowly push in from the atlantic. Thats going to bring in increasing breeze and also the chance of showers or even longer spells of rain, particularly for part two of the weekend. Saturday doesnt look too bad. Looks like it will stay mostly dry. Variable cloud, light winds, winds with some sunshine. The winds will start to pick up across southern and western areas as that area of low pressure arrives by The End of the day he could start to see Showery Burst of raisins arriving here. Temperatures, low 20s in the brighter spots. Mid to high teens across the far northeast. Into sunday it looks like we will see a band of Rain Start spreading across the country that could be quite heavy. Followed by sunshine and heavy showers. Welcome to Bbc News im David Eades our top stories. President Biden Issues a forceful defence of the chaotic us withdrawal from afghanistan ending americas longest war. We succeeded in what we set out to do in afghanistan over a decade ago and we stayed for another decade. It was time to end this war. The taliban take the spoils of war american uniforms, american weapons left behind in the rush to get out. Now it is ended and the worst of ways. And it will live long in memory here in afghanistan, in america and far beyond. In california fears of strong winds to fan the flames