Gadgetory

the car company known for safety is trying to remove one more danger from the driving equation humans we think we can expand this autonomous driving mode to other not just a two-lane highway we can go into streets and junctions and more complicated situations Volvo is the latest company to unveil a self-driving car scene it's Tim Stevens hitched a ride and experience the technology firsthand I notice that you had to manually change around this spell unlike other car makers working on autonomous driving Volvo is taking a different path they're basing this technology on sensors that are already in production cars today there's really nothing bigger advanced that's not already available today that enables the functionality that Volvo is putting in place that means it's a lot cheaper than the other solutions that companies are working on and certainly a lot easier to put into production but it's still a work in progress currently the cars can't merge or change lanes and they can only be driven autonomously on a single highway in Volvo's hometown of Gothenburg Sweden it doesn't have the vehicle to infrastructure communication that's going to be required basically so that the city can send messages to these cars and let them know where there are emergency vehicles or road construction and so that the car can change lanes and get around them in advance but that's definitely something that will be in place before these cars are made available to the public Volvo did demonstrate a nifty self-parking feature made possible with a camera and ultrasonic sensors on the bumpers if Volvo stays on track a hundred of these self-driving cars will be ready for the public by 2017 with this autonomous vehicle tech Volvo enters an increasingly crowded space this is not one of those things we have a lot of car makers sitting on the sideline saying now this isn't like diesel vs hybrid vs. electric where they've all gone different directions everyone realizes this is a major trend that is coming societally and logistically we're going to need to change the way we drive and basically do less of it ourselves as a society Google's self-driving cars the most autonomous of all the driverless vehicles have logged nearly 700,000 highway miles and are now cruising city streets Ford has developed a vehicle to vehicle communication system to help avoid collisions while Audi's adaptive cruise control sure can navigate the road when the car speed is below 40 miles per hour what's good about self-driving is long we reduce fatalities reduce accidents reduce the cost of insurance make better utilization of roads much better utilization of fuel on and on and on what's bad about it is a single thing on that list I like to drive fair point but when you're stuck in traffic or hunting for parking plenty of drivers will gladly let technology take the wheel in San Francisco I'm Sumi das cnet.com for CBS News