It was a game of Dots that pushed Erik Coelingh to rethink his entire approach to self-driving cars. Coelingh, Volvo's head of safety and driver assist technologies, was in a simulator, iPad in hand, swiping this way and that as the "car" drove itself, when he hear an alert telling him to take the wheel. He found the timing less than opportune. "They gave the message when I was close to getting a high score," he says. Jolted away from the absorbing task, he had no idea of what was happening on the "road," or how to handle it.

The first self-driving cars to be operated by ordinary British drivers will be left deliberately unmarked so that other drivers will not be tempted to "take them on", a senior car industry executive has revealed. One of the biggest fears of an ambitious project to lease the first autonomous vehicles to everyday motorists is that other road users might slam on their brakes or drive erratically in order to force the driverless cars into submission, he said. This is why the first 100 self-driving 4x4 vehicles to be leased to motorists as part of a pilot scheme on busy main roads into London will look no different than other Volvos of the same model, said Erik Coelingh, senior technical leader at Volvo Cars. The scheme will start in 2018. "From the outside you won't see that it's a self-driving car. From a purely scientific perspective it would be interesting to have some cars that are marked as self-driving cars and some that are not and see whether other road users react in a different way," Coelingh told the Observer.

If you could see that the car in front of you was being driven autonomously and therefore navigating in an ultra-safe manner, how would you react? Would you treat it as you would any other road user or be more inclined to torment it, knowing it would yield to your advances? It's a very real question that car makers and insurance companies are wrestling with and one that has prompted Swedish automotive giant Volvo to take preemptive action. The Guardian reports that it's decided that when the first 100 self-driving 4x4s hit London's streets in 2018, they'll look no different to any other Volvo of the same model so that other road users aren't tempted to "take them on." Those are the words of Erik Coelingh, senior technical leader at Volvo Cars: "From the outside you won't see that it's a self-driving car. From a purely scientific perspective it would be interesting to have some cars that are marked as self-driving cars and some that are not and see whether other road users react in a different way," he told the newspaper.

To judge by recent claims, "fully autonomous" self-driving technology is just around the corner. Uber Technologies Inc. is offering Pittsburgh residents rides in autonomous Ford Fusions. Ford Motor Co. F -0.08 %, BMW AG BMW -0.90 %, Volvo Car Corp. and Lyft Inc. say they will produce fully autonomous vehicles by 2021 or sooner. Tesla Motors Inc. TSLA 0.49 % Chief Executive Elon Musk, rarely topped in hyperbole, says the technology will be here within 24 months. To many industry insiders, these claims are largely hype.

Selected Volvo drivers will be able to put the car inro a self-driving mode in certain parts of London. Driverless cars are coming to the streets of London, with Volvo announcing plans to put autonomous vehicles in the hands of real people on the UK capital's roads. The scheme, dubbed Drive Me London, will begin in early 2017 and comes alongside autonomous vehicle testing on the congested roads of China, as well as the streets of Gothenburg in Volvo's native Sweden, as the car manufacturer looks to research the practicalities of driverless cars in live environments. "We're trying to understand how to bring the technology of self-driving cars to the real world and we believe that the real world is the best place where you can learn," Erik Coelingh, senior technical leader for safety and driver support technologies at Volvo, told ZDNet. Starting in January, autonomous vehicles will be tested on UK roads in up to three cities.

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."

No one's quite sure on just when people will be able to summon a self-driving car and go wherever they need to go. Too many variables--how the technology advances, how regulations are developed, what consumer acceptance looks like--remain for anyone to say, but that's not keeping Volvo from offering a date: 2020. The Swedes synonymous with safety want to eliminate all traffic deaths and serious injuries in their cars by the end of the decade. Because airbags, automatic braking and other active tech can only do so much, Volvo plans to use automated driving to do it. Next year, it plans to see how that tech works in the real world when it puts 100 customers in robocars for an extended beta test in Gothenburg, Sweden.