Volvo has recently announced plans to showcase the world’s first large-scale autonomous driving project in Gothenburg in Sweden.
Dubbed as Drive Me, the project will enable 100 autonomous vehicles to travel on selected roads in and around Gothenburg. The roads cover approximately 50 km (31 miles) and cover highways as well as typical commuter arteries.
The focus of the project will be on several key areas including the societal and economic benefits of autonomous driving and the infrastructure requirements needed for autonomous cars. The researchers will also study consumer confidence in autonomous vehicles and how they interact with them. The project will begin next year but the first cars aren’t slated to be driving in Gothenburg until 2017. The company didn’t have much to say but did confirm that they will be new models that ride on the Scalable Product Architecture.
Volvo CEO Håkan Samuelsson said that Autonomous vehicles were an integrated part of Volvo Cars’ as well as the Swedish government’s vision of zero traffic fatalities and this public pilot represented an important step towards this goal. He further said that the project will give them an insight into the technological challenges at the same time as they would get valuable feedback from real customers driving on public roads.
