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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Taking advantage of technology from the existing active park assist, adaptive cruise control, Lane-Keeping Aid and the PowerShift transmission, Traffic Jam Assist works to drive the car for you under stop-and-go conditions. It does this by monitoring the car in front of you with radar and camera technology, adaptively accelerating and braking on your behalf to keep pace with other vehicles, including those that may suddenly cut you off. The automated steering control will keep you in your current lane too. They say that this technology is being developed “for the mid-term.”

If more cars are equipped with similar technology, we could see improved traffic flow and faster commute times for everyone. It’s all that stop and go that really slows us down.

Ford has also announced that they are working on an upgraded version of its active park assist system. This already lets you parallel park automatically, steering you into a parking spot with only brake input from the driver. The hands-free system is being upgraded for perpendicular parking too, like you would see at the mall parking lot.

It finds a spot with ultrasonic sensors and then steers you into the spot using electric power-assisted steering. Presumably, the user interface is the same, so you don’t need to gas but it’s still up to you to apply the brake (and clutch) and change gears as needed. I’ve used the parallel parking with Ford’s active park assist and while it’s definitely a neat feature, I find that it’s still much slower than parking the old-fashioned way. I guess slow and safe is better than fast with a dented bumper.

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You have probably seen self-driving cars in sci-fi films, well, soon you are going to be able to own one, provided you are living in Nevada. The state has become the first in the US to approve the rules governing the operating of driverless cars on the state’s roadways.

The rules will be governing test vehicles as well as the robot cars that will be launched on the market later on. The difference between the vehicles will be in the license plates: red for test vehicles and green for the approved ones.

According to Bruce Breslow, director of the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles, “Nevada is the first state to embrace what is surely the future of automobiles. These regulations establish requirements companies must meet to test their vehicles on Nevada’s public roadways as well as requirements for residents to legally operate them in the future“.

The new development will definitely be good news for Google. It’s a boon for the search giant’s autonomous vehicle program which was unveiled back in 2010. According to the company, their test vehicles, which come equipped with various sensors including radar, laser sensors, cameras and GPS, have travelled more than 160,000 miles without an accident (Though there was an incident, but Google found the human driver in the car culpable). But as in all the other fields, Google will have competition as Audi, BMW and Volkswagen announced that they are developing robot cars.

As for everyone from all the other states, a similar approval is expected sometime in the future. And just in case you are wondering, they won’t allow you to get drunk while your robot car does the driving for you, although talking on the phone and texting are allowed.

Photo: Total Recall’s “Johnny Cab”

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