Volvo’s Self-Driving Car Experiment Reportedly Being Scaled Back

Volvo is one of the many major car manufacturers working on self-driving cars. The company had previously announced a rather ambitious experiment involving its self-driving cars. It was planning to deliver 100 autonomous SUVs to real people in Sweden for testing. Volvo was going to launch this program in 2017 but according to a new report, the Drive Me program is now being scaled back.

The company had originally announced that it would deliver 100 of its XC90 self-driving SUVs to real people in Sweden. It would later provide a similar number of cars to families in China and the UK. All of the participants of this program would test the cars that would have been capable of running in “unsupervised” autonomous mode on select pre-approved freeways.

Volvo says that the Drive Me program will now be launched in 2021 instead. A report by Automotive News mentions that the company is also reducing the number of self-driving cars that will be involved in this project.

The report says that Volvo will be giving these cars out to 100 people and won’t be giving out 100 cars over the next four years. They won’t be fully self-driving either. The cars will be Level 2 semi-autonomous so they will offer functionality similar to commercially available semi-autonomous driving systems in Europe and the United States.

Volvo will eventually give participating families vehicles with higher levels of automation but that’s going to take time. The ambitious plan of throwing them into the deep end, so to speak, with fully autonomous cars has been shelved for now.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Transportation
Tags: Self-Driving Cars, volvo