A car that will be part of an Australian first trial of driverless technology has been unveiled in Adelaide.
ABC News of Australia reports that the Volvo XC90 model already features cameras, a radar, automatic braking, and blind-side indicators.
Volvo Cars Australia's managing director Kevin McCann told the organisation that, with all those features, it was just a matter of tweaking the software to allow it to go driverless.
"It really is an evolution of our safety technology in the many years of safety research that we've been conducting," Mr McCann is quoted as saying.
"One of the findings we've had is that many accidents could be avoided if the driver could make a quick decision, but a human's not physically capable of doing that so we've put devices in the car to make those decisions earlier and more quickly."
Adelaide's Southern Expressway will be closed on Saturday for the test, where the car will be driven in convoy to show how it behaves in traffic, and how it responds to lane markings and street signs.
Volvo will conduct the testing in conjunction with Flinders University, Carnegie Mellon University, the RAA, Cohda Wireless, ARRB and Bosch, which has engineers in Australia developing driverless technology.
The State Government has introduced new laws into Parliament, to make it easier for manufacturers of cars like these to test their vehicles on South Australian roads which, ABC says, it hopes will attract other tech companies like Google to perform tests in the state.
Picture credit abc.net.au
