Volvo Concept 26: Volvo’s vision of the cabin of a future autonomous car

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The Volvo Concept 26 has been revealed as a vision by Volvo of the cabin of a future fully autonomous car, where entertaining the driver may become important.

Volvo, as well as most other car makers, are working to make fully autonomous cars – cars which will drive themselves – a reality. But taking control of everyday driving away from the driver does raise new issues, so this new concept – the Volvo Vision 26 – imagines solutions for a world where the driver is no longer in charge.

Volvo has created a new cabin concept, which aims to demonstrate what ‘drivers’ of the future can expect when the car’s driving itself, with a selection of three modes on offer – Drive, Create, or Relax – which all do pretty much what they say.

The ‘Drive’ mode is for when the human driver has control of the car, where everything is pretty much as you’d expect, with the steering wheel where it should be and all the controls needed for driving at hand.

But switch over to ‘Create’ mode or ‘Relax’ mode and the steering wheel moves away from the driver, the seat reclines and a big display emerges from the dashboard so you can watch a film, catch up on the news, write an article, check your emails or do anything you could realistically do sat at home or in the office.

It’s all very clever and will turn the daily commute (incidentally, this is the Concept ’26’ as that’s reckoned to be the average car commute time) in to either a productive time or a relaxing event; whichever you choose.

But none of it will come until Volvo is certain their cars can be driven fully autonomously, and to back that up, Peter Martens, Volvo boss, said:

Volvo Cars is among the first to address the subject of self-driving cars and liability. We firmly believe that car makers should take full responsibility for the actions of the car when it is driving in full autonomous mode. If a manufacturer does not accept liability, it clearly implies that they are not confident about their autonomous drive technology.