Volvo’s ‘Drive Me’ is the world’s first large-scale autonomous driving pilot project

Volvo are pushing ahead with autonomous cars, with the Drive Me Project aiming to have 100 autonomous Volvos on the roads of Gothenburg by 2017.

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Like it or not, we’re rapidly moving to the point where autonomous cars will be the norm, with the driver only being involved in the act of driving by choice.

Volvo – unsurprisingly with their stated goal of making sure no one dies in a Volvo in future – is at the forefront of the move to autonomous driving, and have teamed up with the Swedish Transportation Administration, the Swedish Transport Agency, Lindholmen Science Park and the City of Gothenburg in a project called ‘Drive Me – Self-driving cars for sustainable mobility’.

The project kicks off next year with customer research and the development of the necessary technology and Volvo aims to have 100 autonomous cars on the roads of Gothenburg by 2017, where they’ll be driving round approximately 50 kms of selected roads, including commuter roads, motorways and regular queues.

Volvo boss Håkan Samuelsson said:

Autonomous vehicles are an integrated part of Volvo Cars’ as well as the Swedish government’s vision of zero traffic fatalities. This public pilot represents an important step towards this goal.

It will give us an insight into the technological challenges at the same time as we get valuable feedback from real customers driving on public roads.

The Volvos that will be involved in the trial will be based on Volvo’s new Scalable Product Architecture (which will arrive first in the 2014 Volvo XC90) and will be ‘Highly Autonomous Cars’, which means they can do all the driving and not need to hand back to the driver other than by choice.

The Drive Me Volvos will also be able to self-park without the driver.