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Transportation

Volvo Plans To Have Self-Driving Cars In Swedish City of Gothenburg By 2017 134

Posted by samzenpus from the take-me-somewhere dept.
Qedward writes "Volvo is starting a pilot project that aims to have 100 self-driving cars on Swedish public roads around the city of Gothenburg by 2017. The project is called 'Drive Me' and is a joint initiative between the Volvo Car Group, the Swedish Transport Administration, the Swedish Transport Agency, Lindholmen Science Park and the City of Gothenburg, Volvo said Monday. Together they will make an effort to eliminate deadly car crashes in Sweden, said Erik Coelingh, technical specialist at Volvo Car Group. In the next few years, Volvo will develop its Scalable Product Architecture (SPA) in its XC90 model. The goal is to have the first self-driving cars available to 100 consumers by 2017, Coelingh said. They will be able to let their cars navigate about 50 typical commuter arteries that include motorway conditions and frequent traffic jams in and around Gothenburg, the country's second largest city."
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Volvo Plans To Have Self-Driving Cars In Swedish City of Gothenburg By 2017 More

Volvo Plans To Have Self-Driving Cars In Swedish City of Gothenburg By 2017

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  • I for one welcome my remote car derby overlords and look forward to using my new 100 car derby racers to crash into buildings and lamp posts with great amusement!

    • Why would you think that these cars would accept remote commands?

      • Why would you assume they don't?

        The first rule of hack club is assume everyone leaves lots of doors open and try them all.

        Find out if the firmware rev and parts have ports they didn't turn off or enabled bluetooth cell links.

        Then find a way to store instructions somewhere.

        Maybe a traffic sign has a signal - alter or enhance that.

        • Re:I for one welcome my Remote Derby Overlords (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Ralph Wiggam ( 22354 ) on Monday December 02, 2013 @04:19PM (#45577465) Homepage

          It makes zero sense for the vehicle control system to have any connection to anything you mentioned.

          But if you want to live in a Hollywood fantasy world where hackers can set off fire sprinklers, that's fine.

          • Mark my words.

            You should look at the actual Request For Proposal for the entire scheme, it's part of it.

          • It makes zero sense for the vehicle control system to have any connection to anything you mentioned.

            You are correct - it makes no sense for infotainment systems to be connected to the CAN bus.

            So, we've established that doing so makes no sense... which does absolutely nothing to change the fact that they are.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

            But if you want to live in a Hollywood fantasy world where hackers can set off fire sprinklers, that's fine.

            I used to work at a place that made fire alarm/smoke extract systems. The tech was ancient, barely worked and was barely capable of what they were trying to do with it. It suffered from massive feature creep - when it was new most programs were three lines long, simply opening a vent a turning on a fan if there was a fire. Today they try to do all kinds of stuff like day-to-day ventilation tied in to the HVAC system, emergency lift control and remote monitoring.

            Yeah, remote monitoring. Needless to say the s

  • Re: Swedish Capital (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 02, 2013 @03:29PM (#45576949)

    Clueless geek! The capital of Sweden is Stockholm...

  • Capital.. (Score:3)

    by XXeR ( 447912 ) on Monday December 02, 2013 @03:29PM (#45576951)

    Since when is Gothenburg the capital of Sweden?

  • Gothenburg the capital?!? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pmsr ( 560617 ) on Monday December 02, 2013 @03:30PM (#45576963)

    Gothenburg is NOT the capital of Sweden, it is the second biggest city. Education is like butter, the less you have the more you spread.

  • It's Stockholm, not Gothenburg. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    the capital of Sweden. Or does Volvo also plan to move the parliament?

  • Where did Summary Come From (Score:5, Funny)

    by MyLongNickName ( 822545 ) on Monday December 02, 2013 @03:35PM (#45577007) Journal

    Nowhere in the article is Gothenburg called the capital of Sweden nor is it the capital. Perhaps the submitter is suffering from Gothenburg Syndrome.

  • Geography (Score:5, Funny)

    by bob_super ( 3391281 ) on Monday December 02, 2013 @03:37PM (#45577025)

    Let me be the tenth to point out that Sweden's capital is not Beijing.
    It had to be said.

  • In the USA... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 02, 2013 @03:37PM (#45577027)

    they already have that in the capital Mexico City. And in the state of Los Angeles they are soon going to have lots of recharging stations for electrical vehicles! You'll be able to drive all the way to the city of Texas! I think this was all started by president Clooney.

  • This seems to assume that Volvo will still be in the business of making cars of any sort in 2017. I wouldn't bet on that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Lluc ( 703772 )
      Geely will continue to keep Volvo alive for the next couple years. The real deciding factor for Volvo will be whether the Chinese consumer accepts it as a luxury brand and purchases the Chinese-made Volvos. I wouldn't be surprised if Volvo manufacturing starts shifting to China by 2017, however.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Plammox ( 717738 )
        Which makes me glad I just made it to acquire a new Swedish Volvo, before the build quality goes Chinese in the coming years. I have a bad feeling Volvo's swan song is fast approaching. :(

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by swb ( 14022 )

      That's pretty bleak. The Geely takeover appears to have been largely successful and they're appearing to do a lot more innovating than they did under the lost decade of Ford.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mjwx ( 966435 )

        That's pretty bleak. The Geely takeover appears to have been largely successful and they're appearing to do a lot more innovating than they did under the lost decade of Ford.

        What do you expect, its Ford.

        I've driven a number of 2012/13 Fords in the last few months from the Australian XR6T to the Thai made Focus and the American Mustang. They're all pretty crap and really have the technological sophistication of a 15 yr old Honda Civic without the ride quality or mechanical reliability. However the number 1 let down of the all the fords were the automatic transmissions. The XR6 and Mustang had the same problem, serious lag when changing gears but the Focus was worse, when this

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by swb ( 14022 )

          I don't think Volvos use Ford transmissions. My 2007 S80 uses an Aisin transmission, which I think is used on the S60 as well.

          It's a six speed with the "shiftmatic" option that lets you manually go up/down a gear if you want, which is great for passing/merging.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by mjwx ( 966435 )

            I don't think Volvos use Ford transmissions. My 2007 S80 uses an Aisin transmission, which I think is used on the S60 as well.

            It's a six speed with the "shiftmatic" option that lets you manually go up/down a gear if you want, which is great for passing/merging.

            Ford dont build their own transmissions, they buy them from companies who do.

            What Ford do is select them and connect them to the engine and drive trains. If Ford screw this up, it doesn't matter how good the transmission is (or if the transmission is not suitable for the engine)

            BTW, the manumatic "shiftmatic" or "SelectShift" on the Mustang is exactly the bit that doesn't work. You press the shift up or down button and start counting the seconds before the gearbox remembers it's a gearbox and starts m

  • I have to admit I have not been keeping up with all the press on self-driving cars. What coverage I do see is short on details of what they actually can and cannot do.

    What capabilities would a self-driving car really need to be acceptable, both to passengers and to the general public, that current prototypes lack?

    For example, being able to yield to pedestrians at a crosswalk seems pretty important. In my (work) neighborhood we have a couple of crosswalks with no traffic lights, so drivers are supposed to se

    • What capabilities would a self-driving car really need to be acceptable, both to passengers and to the general public, that current prototypes lack?

      Not requiring a $85,000 LIDAR unit, and about $40k worth of other equipment, plus the cost of the actual vehicle, is probably high on the list of requested features.

      • Not requiring a $85,000 LIDAR unit, and about $40k worth of other equipment

        That's Sergey Brin's hobby project. An actual car company's product might be different.

    • but a "dumb" autonomous car is equivalent to the worst-case human driver -- it wouldn't even try to yield, traffic law notwithstanding.

      Where did you get this gem from?

      By all accounts autonomous cars are better at spotting potential road hazards, like deer and pedestrians, than people are. Seeing as people can only rely on what they see where as the cars use a whole host of sensors to detect objects that may not even be visible, like when it's foggy and/or at night).

      There could be a big payoff there, as human operators are pretty bad at dealing with ice.

      Human drivers are bad in every condition. An individual human may be an ok driver, but for every one competent person there's 20 more that should just drive into a tree to pre

      • Where did you get this gem from?
        By all accounts autonomous cars are better at spotting potential road hazards, like deer and pedestrians, than people are.

        If you read what I actually wrote, the problem is one of identifying that a pedestrian standing on the sidewalk has the right of way and traffic should stop. That's not a road hazard. The pedestrian is not even in the road.

      • By all accounts autonomous cars are better at spotting potential road hazards

        The OP's second sentence was "What coverage I do see is short on details of what they actually can and cannot do.". So what sort of "accounts" have you heard, Google hype? (now augmented by Volvo). Any details on conditions or varieties of road hazards tested (not just the ones they successfully detected), not to mention many other details without which this is all meaningless hype? How does it do in a heavy snowfall? Oh, hold it, being in CA Google may not have done much testing with that. Has Volvo taken

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Reapman ( 740286 )

        Just curious - assuming the car can determine who is a traffic cop - as you seem to imply by your response to the GP - how do you stop a teenager on the side of the road from holding his hand out like a traffic cop - something any driver would ignore, but how would the car? Are we installing some wireless signal in all cop uniforms? Can that be hacked? What if a cop doesn't have his special uniform on does the car just ignore him? Do we also replace all traffic cops with robots?

        I'm tired of this whole "

      • By all accounts autonomous cars are better at spotting potential road hazards, like deer and pedestrians, than people are.

        Pretty sure that's just a Law of Averages thing; there are hundreds of millions of non-autonomous cars being operated around the US every day, compared to a few thousand auto-cars. If the numbers were switched (hundreds of millions of auto-cars vs a few thousand diver-operated ones), I'd wager the percentages of who's better at what would be swapped as well.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        Where did you get this gem from? By all accounts autonomous cars are better at spotting potential road hazards, like deer and pedestrians, than people are. Seeing as people can only rely on what they see where as the cars use a whole host of sensors to detect objects that may not even be visible, like when it's foggy and/or at night).

        Spotting them, I think so too. With an IR camera they're much better at picking out elk and deer and whatnot else in the dark on forest roads than humans. Figuring out who's simply walking by on the sidewalk and who's going to make a panic dash across the crossing - or not the crossing - to catch his bus or is absent-mindedly talking on his cell phone on the other hand without going into ultra-paranoid mode will be tougher.

        • Figuring out who's simply walking by on the sidewalk and who's going to make a panic dash across the crossing - or not the crossing - to catch his bus or is absent-mindedly talking on his cell phone on the other hand without going into ultra-paranoid mode will be tougher.

          Something human drivers can't do anyway. If a pedestrian bolts out and there's nothing an autonomous car can do to avoid them, reaction time measured in milliseconds, then there is nothing a human with much slower reaction time, measured in seconds, will be able to do to avoid them. I'd also trust an autonomous car to behave better than a human would, so many times I've seen a person slam on their breaks to avoid someone or something in the road only to spin out of control and end up on a side walk or off i

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It is a lot further along than you think and they (being volvo) have your same concern. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/11/25/131125fa_fact_bilger?currentPage=all

      That is a long read but much better than some of the hype we get.

      "one afternoon, not long after the car show, I got an unsettling demonstration of this from engineers at Volvo. I was sitting behind the wheel of one of their S60 sedans in the parking lot of the company’s American headquarters in Rockleigh, New Jersey. About a hundred

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by 0123456 ( 636235 )

        If we could hit say 80-90% of use case it would turn our world upside down.

        Uh, no.

        It has to be 100% usable, or we'll be back to the AF447 case where the autopilot hands control back to the 'pilot', because it doesn't know what to do, and they crash because they haven't been watching what's happening. And, in the case of a car, you won't have two minutes to figure out what to do before you crash, you'll probably have two seconds.

        That doesn't mean it has to be usable in all road conditions, though; I'm guessing a viable 'cruise control' for the open highway would be much easier than

      • What else is important?

        Wow, one simple contrived test was demonstrated. Was there any background clutter? Snow or rain? Was the dummy even moving? Detecting a single target in a clear field at a distance of 100 yards is about as easy as you get. Consider me unimpressed.

        We do these sort of demos all the time when developing products. It just means "we got something kind of working in some circumstances", and there's a lot of work to be done to turn it into a reliable full-functioning design. Any engineer should know that, and when

  • Those backwards Swedes (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    From the article:

    "By 2017 it should be possible for consumers to read the paper or have a cup of coffee behind the wheel, Volvo said"

    I see commuters reading the paper all the time. USA! USA!

  • If I want to be near hot air I would be flying gliders in Australia instead of listening to marketing BS.
  • Cars driving themselves, flying drones delivering Amazon packages... Very exciting stuff.

  • has any kind of change ranging from planed work that I hope get's into the data base in time to WE NEED TO X RIGHT NOW.

  • We used to have things called "trains" for this. Self-driving cars are point-to-point trains for wealthy people.

    Always Keep It Simple Stupid. Self-driving car is a oxymoron - if we don't trust people to drive cars - and we should't, 'cause they are the biggest cohort of murderers the world has ever seen - then we should build trains on tracks, or pods on tracks, and get rid of the concrete and asphalt paving nightmare. Car is overkill tech for a simple problem. We're trying to mate the 1950s with a drone. I

    • Self-driving cars are point-to-point trains for wealthy people

      And cars used to be loud, dirty, playthings of the rich and were widely criticized by the horse-riding public. Fortunately not everyone is as short-sighted as you.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by wcrowe ( 94389 )

      Easy to build? Really? And how is a modern conventional car any safer from such a device?

    • We're trying to mate the 1950s with a drone

      Now I'm picturing Humping Robot and...what was a stereotypical person in the 50s?

    • Anyone know what a HERF gun is? A EM pulse cannon or gun. Easy to build. Aim and fire, fry the electronics of the car, instant crash.

      To be fair, if you hit a current car with an EMP, I assume you'd lose power steering, which would make things mighty interesting. Don't know how the automatic transmission and other parts would react...but at least this is actually on the ground to begin with.

      they crashed a hunter killer drone in a test by telling the GPS receiver that the drone was 500 feet higher than it was. It dived into the ground.

      IIRC they did that in Die Hard 2 as well. If you had zero visibility and your instruments told you you were 500 feet off the deck, would you do any better? But then we're getting into the territory of instances where pilots didn't trust their instrumen

  • This will be great for those few days out of the year when your Volvo isn't in the shop.

  • Nice (Score:3)

    by Hamsterdan ( 815291 ) on Monday December 02, 2013 @06:14PM (#45578711)

    Now we only need a robot Jean Claude Van Damne

  • And Sweden's going Sharia before 2017

  • Rumor has it that self-driving vehicles currently work extremely well in normal weather conditions, but not yet in unusual weather, particularly snow.

    You wouldn't get to test that much in Silicon Valley. But you definitely would in Sweden.

    So it will be interesting to see how this works out. If there are no problems, we're that much closer to being able to use self-driving cars anywhere.

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