Project Synergy

Driverless cars will ferry passengers from Stockport to Manchester Airport in a tightly spaced convoy, while a separate fleet of three pods shuttles travellers between the airport car park and the terminal. This project tackles a practical bottleneck: making autonomous vehicles work in real urban environments, not just test tracks. Current driverless technology struggles with coordination, charging, and user trust. Project Synergy integrates three innovations to solve these problems. Graphene supercapacitors allow rapid battery charging and power sharing between vehicles. An artificial intelligence system acts as a natural-language concierge for passengers, particularly helping older and visually impaired users. Secure real-time communications keep the platoon connected with urban infrastructure, sharing audio and video between vehicles during operation. If successful, the project could reshape how people move through cities. Instead of driving to airport car parks and hunting for spaces, passengers might be dropped directly at the terminal by a coordinated pod. The underlying technologies—fast charging, secure vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, and AI-driven user interfaces—could also apply to delivery fleets, public transport, and logistics hubs. The project explicitly aims to create new business models and jobs, linking mobility improvements to economic growth.