Students in many Ivy League schools have been increasingly working on autonomous driving vehicles. The United States Department of Defence holds an annual competition for autonomous vehicles called the DARPA Urban Challenge. Volvo's 2010 S60 sedan is a good example of how many of these technologies, first developed within academia (rather than directly within the industry) is slowly but gradually making its way to the market place.
Volvo have recently gone a publicity stunt, by deliberately driving its S60 prototype around busy streets of Copenhagen, Denmark, purportedly to "test" the S60's party trick feature - Collision Warning with Full Auto Brake and Pedestrian Detection. It's quite a mouthful. Below is extracted from Volvo's press release.
Volvo Cars tests new, unique safety technology in Copenhagen - in a disguised S60 prototype
Recently, sharp-eyed citizens in Copenhagen have had the opportunity to get a sneak preview of the upcoming, sporty Volvo S60 - which won't be introduced to the world until next year.
A disguised prototype of the new sedan model has been rolling through the streets of the Danish capital in order to test a groundbreaking new safety technology that can detect a pedestrian in front of the car and brake automatically if the driver doesn't react in time, to avoid an accident.
The new technology - Collision Warning with Full Auto Brake and Pedestrian Detection - will be introduced together with the all-new Volvo S60 in 2010. Volvo Cars' safety experts have been working with Pedestrian Detection technology for ten years and test cars have been rolling all over the world - most recently in the busy streets of Copenhagen.
"Factors like traffic behaviour, road conditions and climate must be taken into account in the design of the final system. All told we have collected more than 500,000 kilometres of real-life data. We can also use the information from these traffic tests to conduct advanced computer simulations," says Thomas Broberg, Senior Safety Advisor at Volvo Cars.
Continue reading the press release by downloading it here.
Watch the video below.
It is quite odd for a car manufacturer to allow its development mules / prototypes to be seen in public. The standard operating procedures for these cars is that they must never be seen in highly populated areas in the daytime, must not stop unless absolutely necessary and if they do need to stop for extended period of time the vehicles must be covered. Even the interior panels must be hidden under some dark cloth. Whenever manufacturers drive their prototypes around its either they are doing it for publicity or that they are done by clueless local distributors who understands neither the proper industry guideline nor the reason behind such practices. Case in point is Edaran Tan Chong's comical act of driving the Sylphy (before it was launched), masked with white tapes, being driven in the daytime along the LDP highway! When the same car is already launched in Singapore for more than a year, sold by Tan Chong's subsidiary in Singapore! Even I myself saw the ETCM pre-production model (you don't call a model that has gone on sale for years in Japan a prototype) along the LDP once but I didn't bother whipping out my camera and getting all excited like some jokers on the Internet. At the same time, Singapore registered Sylphy models continue to drive across the Causeway, undisguised of course.
Volvo S60 Concept shown.
The 2010 S60 sedan was recently rumoured to be cancelled, due to uncertainty of Volvo Car's future. Volvo Cars is currently being put up for sale by its parent company Ford. The car was supposed to have its global preview in September's Frankfurt Motor Show and European market launch is slated to be in late 2009. But as we all know, the car did not make it to Frankfurt 2009. Volvo Cars had to do something as part of its PR efforts to remind the public that its still business as usual for the company. Launch of the new S60 is expected to be delayed for at least another year, into 2011.
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