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NEWS
Volvo's autonomous fleet pilot project for 2017
A hundred vehicles featuring near-autonomous capabilities will take to the roads of Volvo's home town in 2017In 2007, Volvo declared that by 2020, no one should be killed or seriously injured in a new Volvo car. Now it’s announced an important element in how it plans to achieve that, rolling out what it calls “the world’s first large-scale autonomous driving pilot project” in its home town of Gothenburg in Sweden.
Dubbed ‘Drive Me – Self-driving cars for sustainable mobility’, the project will put 100 Volvos equipped with autonomous drive systems on public roads in and around the city. Preparatory work begins in 2014, with the first of the fleet rolling out on to roads in 2017. Coverage will be limited to a carefully chosen tract of about 50km of “typical commuter arteries [including] motorway conditions and frequent queues,” the company’s statement says.
Volvo is running the project in conjunction with the City of Gothenburg and local and national Swedish transport administrations and Lindholmen Science Park, a Gothenburg-based technology centre developed specifically for R&D work in intelligent vehicles and transport systems, mobile communication and media.
Autonomous drive has many well documented practical and potential benefits, social and economic, for individuals and wider societies. With the right infrastructure and sufficiently well-developed, robust technology in place, taking control of the car out of human hands stands to save lives and limbs. It can optimise traffic flow, helping cut fuel consumption and emissions. In time, it will also allow people who wouldn’t normally drive to use cars, as well as allowing them to manage their time better, working and doing other things in transit. The effects of the technology reach deep into urban and fiscal planning.
Looking to quantify the social and economic utility of autonomous drive systems, the group will gather and analyse data on the pilot fleet’s potential and real contribution to traffic efficiency, road safety and environmental wellbeing. In scoping out the limitations of the technology and showing how drivers of surrounding vehicles interact with the pilot cars, it will help provide pointers to present and future infrastructure requirements.
“Autonomous vehicles are an integrated part of Volvo’s and the Swedish government’s vision of zero traffic fatalities,” Volvo Car Group CEO Håkan Samuelsson said in the company’s statement.
“This public pilot represents an important step towards this goal. It will give us an insight into the technological challenges at the same time as we get valuable feedback from real customers driving on public roads.”
Participants are looking on the project as an important contributor in defining and scoping out the place of autonomous vehicle fleets in urban planning, helping pave the way for more efficient land use and reducing infrastructure investments.
Volvo’s technical specialists are setting up the fleet as “highly autonomous”, in accordance with the official definition coined by Germany’s Federal Highway Research Institute (BASt). This means they will be able to handle “all possible traffic scenarios” autonomously, albeit at the discretion of the driver, who will still need to be available to take over. As a safety and reassurance measure, autonomy will extend to cars exiting the traffic flow and sidelining themselves if drivers find themselves unable to assume control.
The anointed cars will be new models developed on Volvo’s upcoming Scalable Product Architecture (SPA). SPA prepares Volvo models for ongoing support and safety systems upgrades, extending to highly autonomous drive. The architecture makes its debut in 2014, in the next-generation XC90 SUV. That car will make its global show debut in late 2014, reaching European roads in the first half of 2015 and arriving Down Under some time beyond that.
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Written byJeremy Bass
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