Why Volvo believes China is the route to making driverless cars a success

Volvo wants to use China's roads as a test bed for a driverless car experiment which, if successful, the Swedish auto manufacturer claims represents a leap into the future for truly autonomous vehicles by allowing the driver (or is that passenger...) to sit back and relax while on the road. "Autonomous driving can make a significant contribution to road safety," said Håkan Samuelsson, president and chief executive of Volvo speaking at the announcement of the project in Beijing. "The sooner autonomous driving cars are on the roads, the better". Erik Coelingh, senior technical leader for safety and driver support technologies at Volvo said: "We've all seen the really exciting developments in the technology, but what we're trying to do is to really understand how this can bring an impact to society, as well as too our customers." Coelingh said: "We felt that the best way to learn was to deploy 100 self-driving cars with ordinary customers behind the steering wheel on public roads in order to learn about how the technology works; learn about how it impacts on safety and how ordinary customers would use a self-driving car."