The next XC90 coming here is designed to carry a feature considered the key to unlocking fully automated driving.

THE next generation of a Volvo car strongly supported by Kiwis will avail within three years with technology crucial to enabling safe automated driving – but whether it can be used effectively here then is far from certain.

The Swedish car brand’s local distributor has confirmed it is line for the next XC90, a large seven-seater luxury sports utility, debuting an advanced self-driving suite using lidar.

Lidar is a radar that – as the acronym suggests – uses light detection and ranging to measures distance using pulsed laser light to generate a highly accurate 3D map of the world around the car. 

Lidar sensors are considered by many automakers and tech companies an essential piece of technology to safely roll out autonomous vehicles.

Because? Just like human-driven cars, vehicles enacting autonomously must face traffic congestion, potholes, trees and numerous other obstacles. Lidar is the technology that works as an ‘eye’ and to opportune accuracy gains far beyond the level from existing radar and camera technology that’s already in operation and increasingly commonplace, especially in luxury brands.

With Lidar Volvo is promising it will deliver fully autonomous vehicles which can navigate highways. With the emphasis on the last word. This is not designed to enable full-time hands-off driving in any other scenario. City streets, country roads, carparks, your driveway, the beach … no, too hard. There will still be a steering wheel, still the need for a driver.

Volvo has been at the forefront with its highway pilot system, which in current form uses radar, cameras and software to read road conditions well enough to be a semi-autonomous aid. It fits as standard to most product now.

However, the new system, developed with a highly secretive Silicon Valley start-up, Luminar, is a significant world-first step beyond that ability, Volvo New Zealand general manager Coby Duggan says.

What’s unveiled now potentially feeds off a trial Volvo conducted on part of Tauranga’s motorway back in 2016 that became first official trial of an autonomous driving system in this country in real world conditions.

In that test, the trial car – also an XC90, but the current model – used a more sophisticated version of the self-drive technology presently available in production models to navigate the road.

Driver intervention was minimal, only required to u-turn at the halfway point of the 15km journey. What impressed onlookers and trial partners the Ministry of Transport, NZTA, Trafinz and the maker was how the car operated seamlessly and safely alongside other vehicles.

At that time the smarts were just in Beta form – the car had to be smartened with software brought in from Sweden (on a memory stick), with an expert from Gothenburg head office to operate it.

Much progress has since occurred with the ‘Drive Me’ development programme, including an initiative in Sweden that saw 100 families testing fully autonomous vehicles on public roads. 

Now comes the overnight announcement of the lidar integration being set for production. 

Volvo, whose parent is Chinese giant Geely, says this latest advance will be part of a hardware package for vehicles on its second-generation of the Scalable Product Architecture that underpins all current models.

That programme kicks off with the next XC90, which Duggan says is set to avail here in late 2023, a year after international release.

Volvo’s confidence in the new system is such it has immediately assured it will take full liability should anything go wrong.

It says the lidar package might initially start out an option, but will eventually become a standard feature.

Either way, Duggan says it is probable all new XC90s will carry the core electronic elements – and presumably at least the lidar housing - regardless of how prepared export markets are for automated driving.

Luminar and Volvo have not revealed how much this version of highway pilot might cost. Luminar has previously said its Iris lidar unit will cost less than $NZ1600 per unit for production vehicles seeking full autonomy and about $NZ800 for version used for more limited purposes like driver assistance.

Will New Zealand be ready for this? Hard to say. Realistically, it would likely only prove useful on motorways built to latest design standard and in perfect order; as Tauranga’s was. Roadworks, congestion, confusing markings … these remain a challenge even for tech in its most advanced form.

All the same, from a legislative perspective, NZ is well-placed for the ‘if’ and ‘ when’ of autonomous driving and there seems to be a healthy consumer interest in hands-free driving.

“So, yeah, I think we are getting there. Yes, we still need to understand more about what needs to happen in infrastructure terms to make sure the cars are able to perform as they are intended to.

“Yet we’ve always said the NZ is quite open to this and is receptive to an uptake of new tech.

“From a legislative perspective it is well prepared and NZ customers certainly seem to be keen to explore what’s available. But I also think the condition of the roads will also be pretty critical and there’s probably lots of work yet to be done in that respect.”

Of course, NZ standing out as a particularly tasty test site for real world AI driving only carries so much currency - the reality remains that ours is a small country so generally has to wait its turn.”

In some respects, it’s no different to where NZ finds itself with electric vehicles; makers appreciate our high level of renewable energy and identify the infrastructure is reasonably good, yet still have to give bigger markets priority.

“In some respects it would be nice to think we could be at the forefront but the reality is … we won’t necessarily be landing those cars first.”

Even so, in broad terms and regardless that it’s too early to unwrap where we place in Volvo’s planning, the tech is great to see and he anticipates his office and the sales network will receive plenty of customer inquiry.

It’s going to be a learning experience for everyone. “The more that we know about the technology in advance of the car arriving then the more we can start that education process.”

It’s not as if owners will be going in cold. Current Volvos are, like most modern luxury cars, equipped to engage semi-autonomous hands-off operation in specific conditions and for short duration.

“The notion of autonomous driving in the first instance is about making the most boring and the most unsafe aspects of driving safer and more convenient. There is obviously a piece of that depending on the infrastructure being what it needs to be, but obviously this (new) tech takes it forward.”

Volvo is hardly first to seek to adopt Lidar; the advancement here is as much as anything else in the packaging of a system that sends out thousands of laser pulses every second, these colliding with the surrounding objects and reflecting back to create a 3D point cloud. An onboard computer records each laser’s reflection point and translates this rapidly updating point cloud into an animated 3D representation. What has kept lidar off cars is cost and the ungainliness of the set-up: Who wants a car with a bucket-sized rotating device – requisite for a 360 degree view - installed on the roof or bonnet?

Well, no-one. Luminar’s solution is to forgo looking anywhere but ahead. So it’s sensors are fixed in place with a 120-degree horizontal field of view. This allows Volvo plans to integrate Luminar's iris sensors into the car's roof just above the windshield, where it will have a good view of the road ahead of the vehicle. The whole thing is really compact, about the size of really thick sandwich.

Luminar CEO Austin Russell says the announcement also represents years of work bringing down the cost of its technology. Luminar's technology is built around a relatively exotic type of laser operating at 1550nm. The fluid in the human eye is opaque to light at this frequency, allowing lidars to use higher power levels without running afoul of eye safety regulations. That helps Luminar's lidar achieve an impressive 250-metre range. 

The downside is that transmitting and receiving a 1550nm laser light requires the use of unusual and expensive semiconductor materials like indium-gallium arsenide (yeah, we also hope that one never comes up on The Chase). That's in contrast to conventional 905nm lidar systems that can be made using ubiquitous silicon-based components.

The perception software equally crucial to making it all work is still under development. The aim is to activate it wirelessly once it is verified to be safe in individual geographic locations. Volvo says it will continue to expand the capability of the software such as pushing up the maximum speed a vehicle can travel while driving autonomously. But it enforces this is primarily for highways. 

Even so, that’s a big step. And, yes, over time, updates over the air will expand the areas in which the car can drive itself. But Luminar enforces a safe introduction of autonomy is a gradual introduction – quite a different message, then, than we’ve heard from a certain someone in the electric car business.