Surrey County Council is trialling the use of artificial intelligence cameras to spot potholes.

Dashboards on all the authority's Highways vans have been kitted out with the AI technology, which can home in on and measure the ruts in the road that so vex drivers.

The council fixes an average of 50,000 potholes each year, and it is thought the use of machine learning will help it to stay on top of deteriorating roads.

As well as assessing the defects' severity, sensors measure the road temperature to calculate when gritting is needed.

Cllr Matt Furniss, Surrey's cabinet member for highways, said: "We are well aware that potholes are an area of concern for our residents and want to do all we can to help improve this situation.

"The aspiration is to determine if these technologies can be used to give us data more quickly and with better degrees of accuracy from which to make decisions about our highway network."

At the start of this month, as a result of the cold snap, nearly 400 road defects were reported each day across the county, with one day peaking at 586 reports.

Cllr Furniss said the council had increased the number of teams dealing with safety defects to 22, which compares with a "business as usual number of around 10 to 15", and the council is "currently fixing all reported priority two and three defects [those which should be fixed within one week or four weeks] in an average of 3.6 working days."

The Department for Transport does not take traffic volumes into account when determining how much to fund local governments, and Surrey's council leader Tim Oliver thinks this is unfair.

"We get the same pound per mile as everywhere else, and yet we get far more traffic," he said.