Volvo breaks new ground with amazing new self-driving car tech

Are self-driving cars for real? Or just a shallow distraction, a kind of Hollywood-style robo-chic?

If our recent trip to a test facility near Gothenburg, Sweden courtesy of Volvo is anything to go, it’s very serious stuff. In fact, it’s a big part of the solution to road safety. And it’s central to Volvo’s aim to reduce fatalities to zero by 2020.

That’s right, Volvo’s ambition is to ensure nobody is killed or even seriously injured in its cars. And the plan is to produce cars that can achieve that aim by 2020.

To achieve that, Volvo is developing a plethora of new technologies, many of which fall into the self-driving category. And we’ve driven prototypes featuring all of them. Or not driven them, if you see what we mean.

Cruise control with steering

Then there’s the road edge and barrier detection system that senses when the driver is drifting off the road surface or towards a barrier and gently steers away from danger. That doesn’t sound all that dramatic, but Volvo reckons roughly half of all traffic-related fatalities involve cars departing the road in some form.

But of all the automated driving technologies, it’s got to be the Adaptive Cruise Control with steer assist that’s most impressive. We’ve experienced quite a few smart cruise control systems before. Several manufactures offer solutions that can adjust speed to the car in front.

Some can even do so right down to a complete stop. But Volvo’s is the first that can also steer the car. The system’s final capabilities are still being finalised, including the top speed at which it will operate.

But the general idea is that it functions in heavy stop-start traffic rather than being designed to take over driving when you’re cruising in free-flowing traffic at motorway speeds. Anyway, the system seems to work flawlessly and is a major step up from existing cruise control systems in terms of taking the effort and stress out of driving.

Not quite no-hands

There’s only one snag and that’s a requirement in the final version that will appear in Volvos next year to have your hands on the steering wheel at all times. It sounds like a minor detail, but the prototype system allowed you to completely release the steering wheel. It’s an incredibly liberating experience.

The reason for the hands-on requirement, of course, is that fundamentally this technology does not make the car fully autonomous. It only works in a relatively limited set of conditions and the driver needs to be ready to take over immediately.

That said, we reckon it will make for much safer cars. Unlike dozy humans, the system never nods off, sends texts to its friends or rear-ends the car in front as it fumbles for snacks in the centre console.

Robo-parking

Volvo’s final autonomous car technology is auto-parking. This isn’t a system that helps you steer into a bay. You entirely exit the vehicle and command it to park via a smartphone app. And it goes off on its own and does its robo-thing.

It’s quite unnerving watching an empty Volvo V40 glide around a car park and then slide into a bay with immaculate precision. But it’s also the one technology here that’s frankly a bit faked.

It’s not coming soon to any production Volvo and the demo was essentially pre-programmed rather than the car negotiating the car park on the fly.

Volvo’s demos also showed there’s more to these advanced safety systems than just robo-driving. Another major aspect is car-2-car and car-2-infrastructure comms.

Car-2-car comms

The idea here is to keep cars updated with various safety critical info. One example is an icy patch on the road. Once detected by one vehicle, the location of the dangerous patch can be shared either directly car-2-car or uploaded to a cloud database so that all connected cars are aware of the hazard.

This kind of system can also be used, for instance, to warn drivers that an emergency vehicle is approach before the driver can see or hear it. Volvo showed us demos of both examples.

Overall, it’s a very impressive package and it puts Volvo in a unique position. For many of the big German brands, the transition to autonomous driving is proving tricky.

They all know that robocars are the future. But in this transistional period, shaping the message to customers is a challenge. How do you pitch the whole autonomous driving thing when the core proposition of your product line up is a superior driving experience?

Also, how do you tell customers about the benefits of robocars without inferring that drivers are a talentless, murderous bunch?

Source:http://www.techradar.com