A fleet of driverless cars will travel from London to Oxford in 2019

Britain is at the forefront of driverless vehicles technology with autonomous shuttles and self-driving cars being tested in the streets of London.

Now, the UK government has announced plans to have cars traveling autonomously from London to Oxford in 2019.

Driven, a consortium led by Oxbotica, received £8 million in funding from a total of £13 million invested by the government in this area.

While Oxbotica is already conducting self-driving shuttle trials in London, the aim is to develop a fleet of autonomous vehicles to travel long distances on British motorways within the next 30 months — with safety drivers on board as a backup.

Tests are being conducted at RACE, a robotics centre in Oxfordshire run by the UK Atomic Energy Authority, which has 10 kilometers of roads, junctions, roundabouts, and even traffic lights and pedestrian crossings.

"Driven is important because it will answer questions around cyber security and insurance as well as the underlying technology," RACE Director Rob Buckingham said.

Britain's announcement comes after companies that are trialling self-driving cars, such as Uber, are having a rough time of it lately.

An autonomous Uber vehicle was involved in a high-profile accident in Tempe, Arizona, over the weekend, prompting the company to pull its fleet of self-driving cars off the roads there and in its other testing regions in Pittsburgh and San Francisco.

Earlier this month, leaked documents showed Uber cars have struggled to drive for even a mile without human intervention, and the integrity of the technology has been called into question by a lawsuit from Alphabet over stolen secrets.