Volvo Cars’ forthcoming fully electric flagship vehicle will feature Luminar's lidar system as standard.
The fully electric successor to Volvo Cars’ XC90, to be unveiled in 2022, is set to come with lidar hardware featuring Luminar’s Iris and perception from its Sentinel solution, in addition to an autonomous driving computer powered by Nvidia Drive Orin and Zenseact and Volvo software. Volvo Cars aims to reduce fatalities and accidents as a whole with this new safety package.
Austin Russell, Luminar Founder and CEO, said: 'This is a watershed moment for the industry, and Luminar’s most significant win towards establishing the next era of safety technology,' he said.
'Going from a select highway pilot option to Luminar powering all next generation Volvo flagship cars as standard will kick off this new safety paradigm.'
With the new safety package, Volvo Cars aims to reduce collisions and the reduction rate is anticipated to accelerate over time via over-the-air software updates. The new technologies are also designed to specifically address traffic situations that result in large portions of the severe injuries and fatalities that occur today.
Håkan Samuelsson, chief executive of Volvo Cars, said: 'By having this hardware as standard, we can continuously improve safety features over the air and introduce advanced autonomous drive systems, reinforcing our leadership in safety.'
Beyond the sensor suite and AI computing performance, Volvo’s flagship model will also come with back-up systems for key functions such as steering and braking that make it hardware ready for safe, unsupervised autonomous driving once available. Alongside the lidar and autonomous software, these control redundancies help enable the Highway Pilot functionality, an autonomous driving feature for use on motorways and will be activated for customers when verified safe for individual geographic locations and conditions.
