Standing for Safe Road Trains for the Environment, the SARTRE project effectively gets groups of up to eight vehicles to all drive together as if they were a connected a train. There is a “lead” vehicle, likely a bus or a truck, that is driven by a professional and this lead vehicle effectively steers and drives the other cars by way of wireless communication. The gaps between the cars are minimized (no more than four meters), which reduces drag and thus improves fuel economy. The project appears to have been quite successful, proving a concept for the future of suburban commuting.

Road trains can be integrated on conventional highways, so you don’t need as much in terms of additional infrastructure. When your car is in one of these road trains, you can kick back and relax, reading a book or playing a game on your tablet. When you get closer to your destination, you take over control of your car, pull out of the road train, and continue on to where you need to be. In this way, these autonomous vehicle trains fit somewhere between conventional single-car commuting and public transportation. It also provides that middle ground toward fully autonomous vehicles, like those being tested by Google.

The SARTRE project was led by Volvo, hence all the Volvo vehicles in the pictures, but this could just as easily be expanded to other cars too. Volvo is saying that these autonomous road trains could be on conventional highways with mixed traffic within the next ten years; the biggest hurdles are legislative. This sounds fascinating and while it won’t be a final solution for mass transit, it does look like it could be very useful in the short to middle term.

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You wake up at 7:00AM to get to work at 8:00AM. You have a 50-minute commute ahead of you, you’re not panicked, you’re used to this. Besides, you just got out of the 6:00AM routine and think early mornings are for saps.

You put the kettle on while you grab a five-minute shower, dry off, throw on some clothes, mix some instant coffee into a travel mug, grab a few things and hop into your car.

Ten kilometres down the road you pull up close behind a long string of cars, seemingly driven by a bunch of tailgaters, you slap a button on the dash, take your hands off the wheel, foot off the gas and eyes off the road. You grab your egg burrito, e-reader, sketch pad or whatever else you use to devour content during your morning routine.

And you don’t crash.

This is the future of the morning commute.

SARTRE, or SAfe Road TRains for the Environment (and on an unrelated note, the surname of Nobel Prize in Literature-winning French writer, philosopher and Marxist), has been working for the last year and a half to bring this futuristic dream to today’s roads, using today’s technology.

The system uses a pilot truck to communicate with and take control of a string of private cars driving down existing European highways. Though it’s only being tested on a small scale in closed, controlled environments right now, the collaboration of six companies expects the system to be used on a grander scale within 10 years.

According to a documentary SARTRE released last weekend, the project is undergoing a ridiculous amount of safety testing, from the systems that take over steering in the individual cars, to the reactions of everyday people to following so closely behind another car at 90 km/h without control of the vehicle – and even the programs that detect the expressions on the face of the lead truck’s driver to ensure he’s not being distracted.

The end goal of the project is to decrease the fuel consumption of privately-owned cars by reducing air drag, decrease the amount of accidents due to driver fatigue or human error by having cars lead by professional drivers; streamline highway traffic and free up road space by having cars drive so closely together, and allow for more comfortable and productive rides for commuters.

Check the video below for more.

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