With new self-driving SUV, Volvo, Uber bet on rideshare, safety

Volvo Cars and Uber present their self-driving car.

ASSUMING you’re in a country where there is Uber, then pretty soon you just might see a Volvo come and pick you up after booking a ride on the app — only this car won’t have a driver in it.

This is because Volvo Cars and Uber have just rolled out a Volvo XC90 which can drive itself, the result of a collab job that started in 2016 between the two companies.

A few prototypes have preceded this self-driving XC90, which relies on an autonomous system developed by Uber. Fact is, the XC90 serves only as a base onto which Uber can fit its self-drive tech. This means it’s quite possible for Uber to deploy a fleet of these cars as an autonomous ridesharing service. The two companies have actually talked of putting out “tens of thousands” of these autonomous drive-ready base cars in the coming years.

What would let these Volvos drive themselves are sensors — plenty of these — placed on the roof and into the cars, which work with Uber’s self-driving system.

Volvo assured the XC90 (and possibly any other vehicle it will supply in future to Uber) is fitted with key safety features. Leading these are “several back-up systems” for the cars’ steering and braking, and an extra battery as a reserve power source. The back-up systems are designed not to let the self-drive car continue traveling should any of the primary systems fail; rather these would bring the car to a stop on a safe spot.

Apparently, Volvo’s self-drive technologies are an extension of its longtime focus on safety. As vehicles increasingly become capable of communicating with other vehicles and the infrastructure surrounding them, as well as recognize pedestrians and other road users, the ability for them to prevent collisions also improves.

According to Volvo Cars chief executive Hakan Samuelsson, the company believes “autonomous drive technology will allow [it] to further improve safety.”

Still, the carmaker also recognizes that self-drive tech can only become completely safe if all cars on the road are autonomous — predicting when this would happen, or how widespread the adoption will be, is a bit difficult. In the meantime, though, the technology, Volvo proposes, can make driving more pleasant as it takes over tasks like tackling traffic jams.

Volvo said it plans to introduce an autonomous base vehicle, similar to the XC90 it developed with Uber, in the early 2020s — or on the next generation of its models. These cars are seen to be capable of “unsupervised autonomous drives” on highways and ring roads designated for self-driving cars.

“By the middle of the next decade we expect one-third of all cars we sell to be fully autonomous,” Samuelsson said.

The project with Uber is also a means for the carmaker to enter into a shared economy platform in which consumers shift away from buying their own cars, but instead will depend on other forms of mobility services.

“Our agreement with Uber underlines our ambition to be the supplier of choice to the world’s leading ride-hailing companies,” Samuelsson added.

Guess Volvo is hedging its (safe) bet.