Volvo, Google test self-drive cars

Volvo Cars and Google have begun testing self-driving cars on the city streets. This is a crucial new phase in the quest to make the technology a standard feature in cars, writes Trish Whelan.

After some years of testing self-driving cars on freeways where driving conditions are more predictable, Google in the past year shifted its focus to city street driving. It has begun testing 100 cars on the streets near its headquarters in Gothenburg Sweden, in a project called Drive Me.

It seems the test cars are now able to handle lane following, speed adaption and merging traffic all by themselves. The aim is that the final cars will be able to drive the whole test route in highly autonomous mode. This technology, to be called Autopilot, enables the driver to hand over the driving to the vehicle, which takes care of all driving functions.

Google said it has driven thousands of miles on the streets of Mountain View in California, a small surburban community where the company has its headquarters, just south of San Francisco. Google's driverless cars rely on video cameras, radar sensors, lasers and a database of information collected from manually driven cars to help navigation, according to the company.

"A mile of city driving is much more complex than a mile of freeway driving, with hundreds of different objects moving according to different rules of the road in a small area," says Chris Urmson, the director of Google's self-driving car project. Their software can detect hundreds of distinct objects simultaneously - pedestrians, buses, a stop sign held up by a crossing guard, or a cyclist making gestures that indicate a possible turn.

Volvo and Google are among several companies, including Nissan Motor Volkswagen's Audi and Toyota Motor Corp, testing self-driving car technology. Both Nissan and Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler say they plan to start selling self-driving cars by 2020.

Google have posted a video that depicted how a self-driving car views the world as it navigates. Google says that in more than 700,000 miles in self-driving mode since 2009, its cars have not caused any accidents while operating in self-drive mode. They say they still have many problems to solve.