Volvo Cars and Volvo Trucks (which are two separate companies, with Cars owned by Geely) has been very open to the idea that humans should not be driving vehicles. As part of their “no-death” policy, the automaker has been making strides towards autonomous driving and they are coming close to the next step: a system called The No-Hit Car System. It is composed of sensors and computers that actively track different types of road users (pedestrians, bicyclists, motorcycles, animals, etc) and overrides steering, braking and accelerating systems in order to avoid an accident if the driver chooses to ignore the warnings the car sends. The system uses radar, lidar, GPS, cameras that cover the entire 360 degrees of the car outward and more in order to determine what is and isn’t an impending danger. Volvo is calling the system “the centralized Sensor Fusion framework”, which doesn’t sound the least bit like some system you could expect to hear in a Terminator movie.

Here is an actual quote from a WIRED article written by Jordan Golson: “Many drivers are (rightly) concerned about the consequences of filling our highways with robots who take over human work loads. This Volvo system, which sits somewhere in-between fully automated and driver-controlled cars, is the kind of half-step that will encourage public acceptance of self-driving vehicles. Given that some 30,000 people die in car crashes in the U.S. every year (to say nothing of the rest of the planet), this technology brings us closer to the day when we sit in our robot-controlled cars and wonder in amazement how people ever drove themselves.”

We, for one, do not welcome our new robot overlords, but leave an opinion and tell us what you think.