Volvo's Drive Me autonomous vehicle project reduces in scale
The swift evolution of sensor technology and the unforeseen challenges of electrical architecture are among the reasons car-maker Volvo has scaled back its Drive Me autonomous driving project. The initiative, launched in 2013, will now involve 100 people, rather than 100 vehicles as Volvo had previously stated, over the next four years. Families in China and London will be joining existing participants already road-testing the Level 2 technology in Sweden. Feedback will then be used to improve the manufacturer's Level 4 cars, set to launch in 2021.

GOTHENBURG, Sweden -- Volvo’s Drive Me autonomous driving project is taking some detours compared with promises the automaker made when it announced the program four years ago, but Volvo says the changes will make its first Level 4 vehicle even better when it arrives in 2021.

In early announcements about Drive Me, Volvo promised to have 100 self-driving vehicles on the road but that has been downgraded. Volvo now says it will have 100 people involved in the Drive Me program within the next four years. Initially, the people taking part in Drive Me will test the cars with the same Level 2 semiautonomous assistance systems that are commercially available to anyone who purchases the vehicle in markets such as Europe and the U.S.

Drive Me is a public autonomous driving experiment that now includes families in Sweden and will be extended to London and China later. The goal is to provide Volvo with customer feedback for its first model with Level 4 autonomy, which means the car can drive itself but still has a steering wheel and pedals so that the driver can take control when needed.

“On the journey, some of the questions that we thought were really difficult to answer have been answered much faster than we expected. And in some areas, we are finding that there were more issues to dig into and solve than we expected,” Marcus Rothoff, Volvo’s autonomous driving program director, told Automotive News Europe.

One of those issues is the automaker’s reluctance to pick a so-called “sensor set” too early.

“The development in sensor performance and processor capabilities is going so much faster than we expected in 2013,” Rothoff said Monday. “Because advancements are being made at such a rapid pace, we want to make this decision as late as possible.”

Volvo also wants to make sure its customers are completely confident with the new technology because if they don’t trust it they won’t use it. Failure here would result in the launch of “a high-cost product with limited customer value," Rothoff said.

“It’s about keeping stable controls so the car behaves like it knows what it is doing,” he added.

It’s also about finding a way to provide something that customers around the world will be willing to pay a premium to own.

“The autonomous car must be the safest car on the road,” Rothoff said. “But you don’t just pay for it being the safest. You need to know it has a value. The research is helping us extract what this value is.”

Volvo already has an idea what future customers will value most: time, especially during their daily drive to and from the office.

“I think offering time during the commute will be one of those values that people will want for a premium car,” he said.

His boss, Volvo CEO Hakan Samuelsson, has said equipping a car with Level 4 functionality could cost add "close to $10,000” to the price.

There is another hurdle that Volvo has encountered that it didn’t foresee when the Drive Me project started in 2013. “The electrical architecture is a really huge challenge that has been more than we expected when we started the project,” Rothoff said.