Leave it to those safe and sane Swedes to come up with the first real-world, large-scale autonomous driving experiment. Officially known as the "Drive me—Self-driving cars for sustainable mobility," the project is a joint initiative between the Volvo Car Group, the Swedish Transport Administration, the Swedish Transport Agency, Lindholmen Science Park, and the city of Gothenburg, Sweden. Intended to pinpoint the societal benefits of autonomous driving—not to mention give Sweden and Volvo a leg up in the ever-evolving world of future mobility—the project will commence in 2014, including the development of a user interface and cloud-based functionality. Volvo is aiming to place 100 autonomous vehicles on the road by 2017, all based on the maker's upcoming Scalable Product Architecture (SPA). The first model will be the next-gen XC90, which is set for a 2014 introduction.
The pilot project will utilize approximately 31 miles (50 kilometers) of selected roads in and around the city of Gothenburg. (Audi was recently granted a license to test autonomous vehicles on public roads in the state of Nevada.) Typically commuter arteries and highways known for heavy traffic, one of the project goals is for the car to be able to handle all possible traffic scenarios by itself, including leaving the traffic flow and finding a safe harbor if the driver is incapacitated and unable to regain vehicle control. Volvo also hopes the project will illustrate how autonomous vehicles may bring societal and economic benefits by improving traffic efficiency and road safety, highlight infrastructure requirements, and determine how surrounding drivers might interact with a self-driving crowd. Additionally, the program aims to increase customer confidence in autonomous vehicles, and facilitate the collection of valuable feedback from real people driving on real roads. The cars will also feature autonomous parking, which will allow drivers to simply exit the vehicle at the entrance of a parking area, leaving it to the vehicle to search for a vacant parking space and park by itself.
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Although capable of fully autonomous operation, the program vehicles will be specifically described as "Highly Autonomous Cars," according to the official definition by the Federal Highway Research Institute (BASt) in Germany. Effectively, this means the driver will be in charge of deciding when circumstances are appropriate for handing the vehicle over to autonomous control, and will be available for occasional control.
from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com
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