When you hear that a car manufacturer is testing a self-driving car, the picture, image or video we usually see is that of a bunch of engineers in the front seat with some expensive hardware. The only time you get to see regular people in those test vehicles is when the company is ready to live with their new test car. Volvo kinda has a different approach to this, the company just revealed that it will be conducting an autonomous vehicle tests with an ordinary family, the Hains from Gothenburg, Sweden. You can call this a marketing strategy but Volvo stated their reason for this approach in a recent blog post
Henrik also stated that the Drive me Project will help the company understand and learn more about how people feel when they engage and disengage autonomous drive, what the handover should be like, and what sort of things they would do in the car when it’s driving them to their destination. With the help of the Drive Me project and the Hain family with tests up to 100 vehicles, Volvo’s planned 2021 launch of a fully autonomous car is on the right track.
