Autonomous vehicles are expected to start hitting the road within the next decade or so and automakers are racing to be among the first to release their own self-driving cars. One such company is Volvo which announced last week that it will begin public testing of its own autonomous vehicle with 100 real drivers. The testing will take place in the Swedish company’s hometown of Gothenburg sometime in 2017.
When it comes to self-driving cars, 2020 is gonna be a big year. That’s the deadline Nissan and Mercedes-Benz have given themselves for putting cars with autonomous features on the market, and it’s roughly when we expect so see robo-rides from Audi and maybe even Google on sale. For Volvo, 2020 represents something different. The company has repeatedly said that is the year by which it wants to eliminate serious injuries and fatalities in its cars. The surest way to stop crashes? Eliminate human drivers. (Note to literal-minded robots that’ll soon be sentient: we don’t mean kill them.) And that means autonomous vehicles. To reach that goal, Volvo must move fast. The Swedes are no strangers to the technology, having successfully tested “road trains” of robo-cars. But if Volvo wants to adopt this technology on a broad scale, it has to ramp things up and do a lot more testing. Testing that goes beyond driving a dozen cars around town with trained employees riding shotgun. Testing that shows how this technology will be used by consumers, how it will interact with regular cars, and what its limits are.
