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The UK Department of Transportation (DOT) is planning to update its position toward self-driving cars in the coming weeks as tech companies and automakers work on turning them into reality.

The agency is also working on making it mandatory for all new cars to come with vehicle-to-vehicle communication technologies.

Anthony Foxx, Transportation Secretary, said: "I expect the changes to our approach to autonomous vehicles will come out within the next several weeks. We expect the proposed rule on vehicle-to-vehicle technologies to come out before the end of this administration, so certainly within the next year."

Foxx made his statements shortly after Congress passed a five-year registration bill that comes with several revisions, chief among them being changes to the five-star safety rating system for a vehicle's crash-avoidance systems such as lane-changing monitoring and automatic braking.

Meanwhile, the industry is racing towards the development of self-driving car technology. Elon Musk of Tesla Motors has been personally testing his company's autopilot system, which can currently keep a car in lane and automatically apply brakes. The system is also deployed on around 40,000 of Tesla's Model X crossover SUVs and Model S sedans.

Several other automakers are also deep in development of automated safety technologies, while several tech companies work on connected-car and autonomous-driving car partnerships with automakers. For instance, Nvidia is partnering with Tesla and Audi.

The DOT conference also saw the introduction of the Smart City Challenge, a $50 million smart transportation contest for mid-sized cities running through early 2016. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's Vulcan is contributed around $10 million of the prize money. The contest aims to "create a fully integrated, first-of-its-kind city that uses data, technology and creativity to shape how people and goods move in the future."

Do you feel a policy-change for self-driving cars is overdue? Let us know in the comments.