The launch of the second-generation XC90 marked the beginning of a new era for Volvo a couple of years ago. The XC90 is the first model to ride on the company’s all-new scalable product architecture (SPA), the first all-new platform to come from Gothenburg since Ford sold the Swedish brand to China’s Geely in 2010. After initially being available only with boosted four-cylinder engines, the XC90 is now the first regular production plug-in model Volvo is offering in America and I recently spent a week driving one.
However, it didn’t really prove anything other than that the basic technology for self-driving cars is now fairly well understood. That doesn’t bring the full-function self-driving car any closer to regular use on open roads. That probably won’t happen until the end of the 2020s.
This demonstration was done on a closed course that is well mapped with no other vehicles around. The real issue that Audi and every other manufacturer has to deal with is working out all the kinks of dealing with weather, less than ideal road conditions, system robustness and of course programming ethics into the system.
That’s not something this particular group of engineers had to deal with. Not to take anything away from their achievement, but there is still a huge amount of work to do before we let self-driving cars loose.
+Volvo Cars completed a real-world test of vehicle platooning. Essentially this a more advanced form of adaptive cruise control (ACC). ACC uses radar or laser sensors to measure the distance to the car ahead and then uses engine and brake control to hold your desired vehicle speed while maintaining a safe following distance.
This semi-autonomous platooning approach adds vehicle-to-vehicle communications that essentially lets the driver in the lead vehicle control all of the following vehicles in a virtual caravan.
Autonomous three-car caravan completes 125-mile public road test
Project SARTRE (or Safe Road Trains for the Environment) has successfully completed a 125 mile test involving three autonomous cars on public roadways in Spain. What differentiates SARTRE from…
The 2013 Ford Fusion will have the most complete suite of driver assist systems in the mainstream midsize segment. Midsize sedans are the highest volume car segment in America so bringing this sort of the technology to the masses is a big deal.
The sensors and actuators that make all of this stuff work are also the building blocks for even more capable vehicles in the coming years. http://fordfusionstory.com/latest #2013fordfusion #driverassist #autonomousvehicles
Back when I was still engineering vehicle control systems, a lot of our testing involved trying to anticipate all of the unpredictable things that the vehicle operator might do. Computer engineers often use the acronym PEBKAC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_error and in the automotive sphere the steering wheel substitutes for the keyboard.
For example the biggest variable in trying to control anti-lock brakes was how hard or fast the driver applied the brake pedal. Many of us dreamed of the day when we could take the driver out of the equation.
The combination of vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications with advanced sensing and actuating systems has the potential to dramatically reduce both collisions and congestion. We're well on our way to semi and fully autonomous vehicles with increasingly affordable collision warning, lane departure, blindspot indicator and adaptive cruise control systems.
I love to drive on a twisty country or canyon road, but frankly the daily commute on the highway is just a grind and I'd just as soon let the car handle the job. #autonomousvehicles
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Why Google's self-driving car may save lives
While driverless cars like Google's may sound scary, the truth is they're safer than the cars and trucks you share the road with today.
Until his retirement in 2009, Larry Burns was SVP of research and development for +General Motors for 11 years where he led a team that worked on all kinds of really cool technology. Larry oversaw development on tech as ranging from robotics to fuel cells to autonomous vehicles and I was lucky enough to chat with him on a number of occasions.
GM has been researching semi and fully autonomous vehicles since at least the early 1990s and in 2007 a fully autonomous Chevy Tahoe built by GM and Carnegie Mellon University won the DARPA Urban Challenge. I was lucky enough to ride shotgun in "Boss" at CES in 2008 as it magically avoided obstacles in the parking lot of the Las Vegas convention center.
Following that victory Burns and director of advanced technology vehicle concepts Christopher Borroni-Bird turned their attention scaling down the technology to create personal urban mobility vehicles that debuted as the EN-V concepts during the 2010 Shanghai world expo.
Burns, Borroni-Bird and William Mitchell wrote a book on their ideas called Reinventing the Automobile that among other things looks at how cars can evolve to become more compatible with increasingly crowded urban environments in the 21st century. Smaller footprint vehicles that can drive and park themselves and be shared will likely be a big part of providing point-to-point personal mass transit in the coming years. http://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Automobile-Personal-Mobility-Century/dp/0262013827/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334063568&sr=1-8
#larryburns #autonomous #autonomousvehicles
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Self-driving vehicles on near horizon, GM's former r&d chief says
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Self-driving vehicles, once thought to be a thing far in the future, will be available by 2020, Larry Burns, former head of r&d at General Motors, said today. Speaking at the U…
As so often happens, racing is leading the way to the future of the automobile, but the big surprise with Google Racing is that they are hooking up with perennial stick in the mud, NASCAR.
Really excited to announce our partnership with +NASCAR for a new racing division based on our self driving cars! This is a big deal and we even have it linked from our home page!
We probably won't see wide spread use of autonomous vehicles until closer to the end of this decade but they have tremendous potential for enabling personal mobility for the very young, the old and the physically challenged like Steve Mahan.
Even for the rest of us, autonomous vehicles have the potential to dramatically reduce traffic jams, especially if we apply the tech to small footprint urban vehicles as demonstrated by +General Motors EN-V concepts. Reduced congestion and steadier speeds also means reduced energy use and safer roads.
I love to drive on a winding road, but frankly on my daily highway commute to the office, I'd just as soon sit back, turn on the kindle and let the car do the work.
We announced our self-driving car project in 2010 (http://goo.gl/dI6qA) with a clear goal: make driving safer, more enjoyable and more efficient.
There’s much left to design and test, but we’ve now safely completed more than 200,000 miles of computer-led driving, gathering great experiences and an overwhelming number of enthusiastic supporters.
We wanted to share one of our favorite moments from some special research we conducted. Watch this video of Steve, who joined us for a drive on a carefully programmed route to experience being behind the wheel in a whole new way. We organized this test as a technical experiment outside of our core research efforts, but we think it’s also a promising look at what this kind of technology may one day deliver for society if rigorous technical and safety standards can be met.
A version of this video with audio captions is available here: http://goo.gl/k5K9Q
The launch of the second-generation XC90 marked the beginning of a new era for Volvo a couple of years ago. The XC90 is the first model to ride on the company’s all-new scalable product architecture (SPA), the first all-new platform to come from Gothenburg since Ford sold the Swedish brand to China’s Geely in 2010. After initially being available only with boosted four-cylinder engines, the XC90 is now the first regular production plug-in model Volvo is offering in America and I recently spent a week driving one. 
