BEIJING, China (Reuters) – Volvo aims to launch an experiment involving self-driving cars in China in which up to 100 such cars could be deployed, the Swedish automaker said on Thursday (April 7).
The planned experiment will see local drivers test the cars on public roads in everyday conditions, Volvo said. It will be conducted in limited driving situations such as on express roads and highways, company executives told Reuters.
“This is probably the country where you will have the first really commercial markets for this, I mean here is where you have hundreds of thousands of people sitting very a lot of time, wasting a lot of time, so I mean, and these are really our potential customers,” President and Chief Executive of Volvo, Hakan Samuelsson, told Reuters.
Volvo, wholly owned by China’s Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co, is currently scouting for a city that could provide the necessary permissions, regulations and infrastructure to allow the experiment to go ahead, the company said. The automaker did not say by when it hopes to conduct the tests.
The move is part of the Swedish company’s efforts to take advantage of the pledges central government policymakers in China, the world’s biggest auto market, have made to embrace futuristic technologies such as self-driving cars.
By calling on cities in China to sign up to participate in the program, Volvo wants to send a message to the Chinese government to “step up to the plate” to make good its often “strident” pledges of commitment to autonomous driving technology made in recent months, a Volvo executive familiar with the planned experiment said.
The China experiment will be patterned after Volvo’s own similarly-set-up testing program in the Swedish city of Gothenburg that aims to start deploying self-drive test cars next year.
Samuelsson said ultimately whether drivers would accept the technology would depend on the safety record of the companies behind them.
“So I mean to get the acceptance and coming back to that I think first of all you have to demonstrate what this is really delivering and I think you just have to build up trust, I mean it’s not very unique that there is, consumers are sceptical to new technology, they have always been really, so I think you have to bring it out, demonstrate it and I think it’s very important as well that you have a good credibility when it comes to safety,” he said.
Besides Volvo, Tesla, Mercedes, Audi and Alphabet Inc’s Google are among those developing self-driving vehicles.
