Volvo is seriously dedicated to making autonomous vehicles mainstream and as part of their campaign, they are planning to test 100 self-driving cars in London before 2018.
The cars will be launched in different phases so that the adoption is done at a gradual pace. Volvo in a press meet said that the biggest challenge they are facing at the moment is related to rules and regulations. There is no specific law to guide them when creating self-driving cars and it has been hindering progress. The brand aims to solve this issue by taking participation in extensive testing but limit it to 100 numbers so that they could understand how traffic is in London before moving to other major cities.
“Drive Me” project initiated by Volvo is playing a crucial role in helping them launch these cars in UK. The project is already successfully established in China and Sweden.They have confirmed to launch the XC90 crossovers which is already being tested in Sweden and Gothenberg. Instead of going for fully autonomous vehicles, Volvo has planned to start with semi-autonomous models for the London streets. It is expected to give them a fair idea of what to expect before going fully autonomous.
The autonomous test the brand has pioneered includes passengers comprising of families. In their official statement, the automobile manufacturer said that they have planned to get statistics from people of all age groups which is vital in preparing the law for self-driving cars when the time comes.
In an extensive research, Volvo has already said that they found at least 90 percentage of the accidents to be committed by human errors. If these cars are controlled by AI which has access to the road map, navigation system, the driving control and communication system, they will not just reduce accidents but are capable of totally stopping such collisions from taking place.
A new self-driving coalition for safer streets was recently formed comprising of Volvo, Ford, Uber, Google among other companies. The joint partnership will allow them to come up with legislative rules and regulations for autonomous vehicles. They are gearing up for a future, possibly by 2020 when majority of cars on the road will be driven by computers and not by humans.
Google is obviously a proactive partner in the group and has populated the Californian roads with its cars a couple of years ago, much earlier when compared to other automakers.
