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Source: Volvo announcement
GOTHENBURG, Sweden — The next generation of Volvo cars are set to be the company’s safest ever, thanks to cutting-edge software and hardware levels, coupled with continuous and more rapid improvements to safety features with the help of real-time data.
Volvo Cars has always taken a data-driven approach to safety, using traffic information from real-life situations to develop new safety technologies and make its cars even safer. For its next generation of cars, Volvo Cars is now looking towards processing data from customer cars in real time, if customers choose to share data and help Volvo Cars make its cars safer.
By allowing customers to choose and be a part of improving safety levels and traffic safety in this way, Volvo Cars can make continuous and much faster improvements to its cars, constantly improving safety levels. This data would include continuous inputs on the car’s environment from sensors like the high-resolution LiDAR delivered by technology company Luminar.
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Volvo Cars engineers would be able to validate and verify autonomous drive (AD) features quicker, to promote a safe roll-out of AD technology. Thanks to the information generated from millions of kilometers driven by tens of thousands of Volvo drivers around the globe, engineers would be able to validate AD features for specific geographic locations much quicker than with a limited number of cars on a test track.
Verified updates to existing systems and new features can be rolled out rapidly through over-the-air-updates, increasing the safety of Volvo cars step by step. The first car to benefit from this new approach to safety development is the company’s first SUV on a completely new electric-only technology base.
“With help from real-life data we can speed up our development processes and go from years to days,” said Ödgärd Andersson, CEO at Zenseact, Volvo Cars’ autonomous driving software arm. “As real-time collection generates a lot more data, we can create better and higher-quality data sets that allow us to make better and quicker decisions on the next advancements in safety. We’re taking a giant leap to increase safety in and around our cars.”
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To process the real-time traffic data they will collect, Volvo Cars and Zenseact are investing in a data factory that will contain over 200 PebiBytes (225 million gigabytes) of data within the next few years. By using artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, data can be crunched at record times. Customers will be able to choose whether this data is collected about them, and all collected data will be aggregated with adequate safeguards for customer privacy.
To view the entire announcement, click HERE.
