As we slowly draw nearer to the commencement of Volvo's 100-car autonomous driving pilot program in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2017, some more details on the project have been revealed. Volvo has released a video explaining how its self-driving cars—all 2016 XC90s—will engage full self-driving mode, and, just as important, how the cars will hand control back to the driver at the end of a robotic journey.
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Volvo's latest update on its Auto Pilot feature depicts the beginning and end of a fully autonomous journey. To initiate the self-driven journey in the Volvo, the driver inputs a destination in the navigation system, and when the system is ready to take control, it illuminates both shift paddles; pull both simultaneously, and you're good to go.
-During the journey, the car displays how many minutes are left before reaching the desired destination; the car also will show animations of various traffic scenarios in real time, such as open passing opportunities the car plans to take advantage of, and cars behind, next to, or in front of the Volvo. When the countdown timer reaches one minute, the driver has that entire span to retake control via the paddles; should the driver fail to do so, the car will simply come to a stop at its destination.
-The Auto Pilot control interface seems intuitive and straightforward. If the system encounters a problem mid-journey and needs to hand control back to the driver, and needs do so quickly, it gives the driver a brief warning period to retake control. Should the request go unheeded, the car will automatically pull over and come to a stop. But, given how the Volvo setup is touted as fully autonomous, such a scenario is assumed to be limited. To us, the rarer in-flight control handoffs are, the better; it removes a lot of the car-to-driver control transition awkwardness found in other systems.
-Take, for example, the very bleeding edge of semi-autonomous tech on the road today found in Mercedes-Benz's E- and S-class models. Combining a self-steering feature with adaptive cruise control, the cars more or less steer themselves down freeways. After 16 seconds, however, the system requires drivers to touch the wheel, signaling a warning and cutting off the feature should it register no response from the driver—while the car is still moving. But what if the driver hasn't been paying attention? Sure, the emergency automatic braking function would kick in should you continue to not pay attention and a crash were imminent, but the car will no longer be steering on your behalf.
-Then there's the car-to-driver control transition in Audi's Piloted Driving prototypes, which can fully drive themselves on marked freeways up to roughly 40 mph; after that point things go from fully autonomous to driver-tonomous and the system gives the driver a five-second window to regain control before bringing the car to a stop automatically. As we said after riding in one of Audi's test cars, "Imagine you're watching a movie when all of a sudden, the screen goes black, a beeping alert sounds, and suddenly you have control of a 4000-pound object traveling at nearly 40 mph entering an "atypical" traffic scenario—how long do you give yourself before you've come to grips with your surroundings? A few seconds? Ten?"
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So it may seem simple in concept, but handing over control to the computers and retaking it when the computers are finished are likely the single most critical actions in our near-term autonomous-driving future. Until cars are fully capable of steering-wheel-free autonomous control, the sharing of driving duties due to system limitations will remain the tech's grayest area, especially given that automakers like to show images of drivers—the same ones allegedly are ready to retake control at the drop of a hat—reading, doing work, or watching movies. Volvo, for its part, seems to be avoiding that tricky step almost entirely, both by aiming for full autonomy and giving drivers a gentle, 60-second countdown to take over as the journey is coming to an end, after which point the car will stop anyway.
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