The Sweden/China connection: A good interview that lays out Volvo’s autonomous vehicle development plan well and generally describes their business approach and the role of corporate partnerships. GLDPartners Auto see’s Volvo’s mature business approach to the science of AV integration as refreshing and one that will lead to very good things. With the Autoliv connection and the map-back to their ownership’s Chinese base, Volvo is an outsized player that will emerge as a true global factor as the industry and the tech matures.
Forbes Now: Interview: Head Of Volvo R&D On Uber Collaboration And Automaker’s Autonomous Vehicle Plans. Interview: Head of Volvo R&D On Uber Collaboration and Automaker’s Autonomous Vehicle Plans
Last month Volvo signed a deal to sell 24,000 of the automaker’s XC90 SUVs to Uber to develop a fleet of robo-taxis.
Most major automakers have their own autonomous vehicle projects as well as collaborations with various partners. That’s also the case with Volvo, which in 2013 announced a 100-vehicle consumer-testing project called Drive Me in its hometown of Gothenburg, Sweden that was later expanded to London and China. Volvo has also worked closely with Uber self-driving car division and last month signed a deal to sell 24,000 of the automaker’s XC90 SUVs to the ride-hailing behemoth to develop a fleet of robo-taxis.
I recently had the chance to chat with Henrik Green, senior VP of research and development for Volvo, to find out what the Chinese-owned automaker hopes to gain from an Uber-Volvo alliance and learn about its own autonomous vehicle plans and the goal for zero roadway deaths in Volvo vehicles by 2020.
Doug Newcomb: How did you get involved with Uber?
Henrik Green: We met up through a connection a couple of years back and understood quite early we had a mutual interest in developing autonomous cars. We also found common ground and a good commitment to collaboration.
Green: Well, being small, comparably in the auto industry, I think it gives us a couple of opportunities. One, we can be fast. Two, we inherently understand we cannot do everything ourselves, so we need to build on partnership which I think in the end will make us better. Because the sum of all those partnerships, in my view, is better than the sum of what you could do yourself. We’re trying to be fast, we’re trying to use partnership to scale.
Newcomb: Uber agreed to purchase 24,000 XC90s. What is Volvo getting from that collaboration?
Green: Mainly we are focusing our internal resources and our skills to develop the base car for autonomous driving We’re developing the base car that has the redundancy and the electrical software architecture to drive a car that is then steered by an autonomous computer. And then next to that we are working on our own autonomous drive system for consumer, private owner experience, or what we call the Level 4 autopilot that we aim to go to market with in a 2021 time frame. That’s the Volvo product for our retail customers, but uses the same base vehicle that is needed for the Uber application where they’ll put their autonomous driving software that is developed for their taxi system. So the base car here is common and we develop that jointly. But that development is with Volvo engineers and in the collaboration, of course, we learn from each other. But they are focusing on their system and we are focusing on the car development.
Newcomb: When will the 24,000 cars go into service with Uber and where?
Green: We are rolling out these cars between 2019 and 2021. For exactly when and where they’ll go into service, you’d have to ask Uber.
Newcomb: Have any of the controversies with Uber impacted your relationship?
Green: I have no real comment on that. We’ve been working on the technical side of the development of the car, and that has been running well. And we get a good collaboration on the technical side.
Newcomb: How does the Uber collaboration differ from the Drive Me program?
Green: When we see our way to autonomous driving, we divide that into three initiatives. We have the base car that needs to be redundant and able to be compatible with the self-driving system. That’s the development project we have with Uber. Then we have our own development with autonomous drive application for retail customer, our level for autopilot that we do in collaboration with the company Zenuity we started as a joint venture with Autoliv. And thirdly, what we’re talking about here is the Drive Me initiative and that’s a research project where the focus is how do humans interact with the self-driving system and the transition between the autonomous drive and the regular drive being handled in a secure and comfortable manner, which we think is a very critical in bringing this technology in a safe way to the market. So for the Drive Me initiative the main focus is the people and how do they interact with these kinds of systems.
Volvo’s Drive Me program is designed to study the interaction between human drivers and autonomous systems.
Newcomb: What are the main motivations for Volvo to get involved in autonomous cars?
Green: Its starts with giving back time to the consumer. And part of what we try to do at Volvo is to make life easier, to make it less complicated, to make the whole ownership of the car less complicated, and you will see and hear a lot of that now with the XC40 and the Care by Volvo concept. At the same time, an autopilot that can take away 20 or 30 minutes of your daily commute and give that time back to the commuter, that’s obviously a very high convenience factor in the near term. Then you can say in a very long-term perspective, we believe that autonomously driven cars where they are a majority in a society or in a city area, that would be an even more traffic safe situation and would contribute to fewer accidents and traffic deaths.
Newcomb: A lot of the focus on autonomous driving has been in cities. Has there been any focus on more remote locations?
Green: I compare it to mobile phones. When you looked at a map from the beginning, where do you have coverage? My new mobile phone doesn’t have coverage at my house in the countryside. And it will be the same here. When we launch the first commercial applications for auto-pilot, I believe there will be designated areas where this is approved and safe and it’s all tested and the mapping is down. And those maps will grow over time and quite rapidly, I’d hope. So you start in dense areas, highways close to the big cities where you have a lot of consumers, and then it would grow to the countryside.
Newcomb: Almost 10 years ago, Volvo announced its Vision Zero initiative to produce a virtually injury-proof car by 2020. Now that we’re two years away, is that still attainable?
Green: Yes, it’s highly prioritized and we’re working on it and we’re taking step by step in every new car model.
Newcomb: But vehicle deaths have increased in the U.S., so it seems like a tight timeline.
Green: It’s a very important milestone for society and for the car industry. And looking at the new Volvo cars, which is what we’re aiming at, we’re saying it is in a new Volvo in that time frame. That’s the target. So every car we have launched we can see an improvement in the injuries and accidents if we go down car model by car model.
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