The Swedish company is likely to enter the market of self-driving cars in 5 years. The idea is to compete with Google and Tesla with their own autonomous vehicle.
Hakan Samuelsson, CEO of Volvo recently stated that the new, Volvo self-driving car will have a steering wheel along the full autopilot system. Uber and Volvo recently made a $300 million deal in order to promote this type of vehicles. Currently, Volvo provided automated taxis for Uber’s testing program that is being held in Pittsburgh. The market of self-driving cars is growing rapidly. Google, Tesla, and Uber are the leaders at the moment, and GM is also developing its own autonomous systems. Volvo sees the opportunity for itself to be competitive. Samuelsson stated that Volvo is planning to dominate the self-driving vehicle market in the future.
Volvo is a carmaker best known for its innovative safety systems and has made itself one of the leaders on the market in this segment. One of the ways to further improve here is to introduce self-driving vehicles that will eliminate the possibility of drivers error as this is recognized as a cause of a large number of accidents.
According to Samuelsson’s words at the Global Mobility Leadership Forum, the Volvo’s autopilot system is going to be fully autonomous and not supervised: “That will make the premium car, even more, premium.”
Volvo made a timeline for itself of five years. In this period, the autopilot system should reach a higher level by beating the autopilot system that Tesla is using. As all Tesla users know, this system requires them to keep their hand on the steering wheel in order for autopilot system to work. It requires drivers to remain alert to take over in the case of emergency as well. We’ll see if Volvo will manage to finish this task in 5 years and offer something better.
