Volvo to test self-driving cars

Swedish-based Volvo Car Group has joined the race to develop self-driving cars, saying it plans to build 100 such vehicles in a pilot project. 

The Chinese-owned automaker said Monday it will test its “autonomous’’ cars on 30 miles (50 kilometers) of selected roads in the Swedish city of Goteborg, starting in 2017.  In what it called “the world’s first large-scale autonomous driving pilot project,’’ Volvo said the vehicle would assume all driving functions, though the driver “is expected to be available for occasional control.''

Self driving cars are the future

Parking would be fully automated, allowing the driver to leave the vehicle as it finds a vacant spot to park by itself.

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Volvo is of course not the first company to talk about self-driving cars. Google famously has one running around in its Mountain View Campus and this driverless car was borne out of the efforts of the highly clandestine Project X team, which looks beyond existing technologies. Another example from the Project X stable is Google Glass, which will likely hit consumer markets next year.

Other companies such as Tesla and Continental AG are also mooting driverless cars. Continental is already in an alliance with U.S. network equipment maker Cisco Systems to work on systems for automated and driverless automobiles and on data transfer between cars, while Tesla’s autonomous car would allow the driver to hand 90 percent of the control of the car over to the vehicle’s computer system.

With inputs from Associated Press