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<\/a>FURTHER READING<\/h3>\n
Flagship sedans like the Audi A8 are a dying breed<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Volvo says that the addition of the Luminar lidar—along with other technology improvements over the next two years—will enable Volvo to offer truly autonomous highway driving.<\/p>\n Volvo’s Henrik Green writes<\/a> that, when a customer activates Volvo’s self-driving feature, “Volvo takes responsibility for the driving and you can relax, take your eyes off the road and your hands off the wheel.” He adds that “over time, updates over the air will expand the areas in which the car can drive itself.”<\/p>\n This suggests that Volvo’s technology will be similar to GM’s industry-leading Super Cruise technology<\/a> in that its use will be limited to specific highways that have been pre-mapped by the manufacturer. However, it will differ from Super Cruise—as well as Tesla’s Autopilot, Volvo’s current Pilot Assist, and similar products from other carmakers—in that drivers will not<\/em> have to pay attention to the road while the feature is active.<\/p>\n This claim will sound familiar to industry insiders because Audi made a similar claim<\/a> for its own lidar-equipped vehicles three years ago.<\/p>\n “When the car takes over, it takes over, and the car has responsibility, allowing the driver to relax,” an Audi rep told us in 2017. “The added value of a self-driving car isn’t the driving itself; it’s getting time back.”<\/p>\n But Audi recently admitted<\/a> it was giving up on its quest to make Audi the first so-called level 3 self-driving system. The company blamed a lack of regulatory clarity.<\/p>\n Luminar CEO Austin Russell, whose company is slated to provide some pieces of Volvo’s self-driving software stack as well as its lidar sensor, believes Volvo can succeed where Audi failed.<\/p>\n “The problem was the technology didn’t work,” Russell said of Audi’s effort. He argued that Valeo’s lidar simply wasn’t sophisticated enough to enable truly autonomous highway operation and that Luminar’s much more sophisticated lidar is up to the task.<\/p>\n “It takes hundreds of people and realistically upwards of a billion dollars to successfully develop an autonomous stack” for highway use, he said, adding that urban applications are even more challenging.<\/p>\n While Volvo and Luminar are aiming to offer the most sophisticated self-driving technology on the market by 2022, those 2022 vehicles will also have an important limitation: they’ll only have a single forward-facing lidar unit. There won’t be a spinning lidar on the roof with a 360-degree field of view. There also won’t be fixed lidars pointing to the sides, to the back, or providing short-range coverage of the road immediately around the vehicle.<\/p>\n That means that these Volvo cars may never be capable of the kind of fully autonomous operation that would allow the vehicles to operate in crowded city streets or to drive around without anyone inside of them. While Volvo hopes to expand the number of roads where its technology works via future software updates, there will probably always be areas where these cars have to hand control back to a human driver.<\/p>\n But even with those limitations, Volvo is setting an ambitious goal for itself. Until now, every carmaker has forced drivers to pay attention to the road when they use its driver-assistance technology. That has given the technology a safety net and carmakers a shield against liability if anything goes wrong.<\/p>\n If Volvo follows through on its plan to offer true “eyes off” technology, by contrast, Volvo would likely be liable for any resulting crashes. So its executives will want to be very, very sure that its cars can operate safely in every situation before they ship the first vehicle.<\/p>\n Tags:<\/b> TIMOTHY B. LEE <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Volvo will begin producing vehicles with powerful lidar sensors from startup Luminar, the Swedish company announced on Wednesday. It’s a significant milestone for the automotive industry as well as a major coup for Luminar. Volvo invested in Luminar in 2018. Lidar sensors will be available starting in 2022 as part of the SPA 2 architecture—the successor to the … Continue reading Volvo plans cars with lidar and “eyes off” highway driving by 2022<\/span><\/a> Continue Reading Volvo hopes to succeed where Audi failed<\/h2>\n
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<\/a>Volvo’s 2022 cars won’t be true robotaxis<\/h2>\n
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TIMOTHY B. LEE <\/p>\n
<\/a>, Wire<\/a>, United States<\/a>, English<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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