Self-driving cars are coming to Australian roads

On Tuesday, the Australian Road Research Board (ARRB) and the South Australian government announced automated vehicles will drive on the streets of Adelaide in November.

The trials are a collaboration between Swedish car brand Volvo, telecommunications company Telstra and technology brand Bosch. The Volvo cars will take to the roads to perform trials of overtaking, lane changing, breaking and using ramps.

The Volvo XC90 SUV rolled out for the trial will be the same as the one used for the Drive Me concept in Sweden — which aims to have 100 automated cars on the road by 2017. The system to make this a reality includes a complex network of sensors, cloud-based positioning systems and intelligent braking and steering technologies.

Kevin McCann, Managing Director of Volvo Car Australia said in a statement the benefits of driverless cars for a city are extensive. „We believe autonomous drive will lead to significant consumer and societal benefits, including improved traffic safety, improved fuel economy, reduced congestion, and the opportunity for improved infrastructure planning.”

ARRB praised the decision that will bring the once-science fiction fantasy to local roads and has called for other states and territories to join the movement.

„The advent of driverless cars is an opportunity to foster technological innovation and revive Australia’s manufacturing industry -– the South Australian Government has been quick to recognise this,” Group Managing Director Gerard Waldron said in a statement. The move follows a push by the South Australian government and various motoring groups in the Australian state. „They could improve safety, reduce congestion and lower emissions,” „They could improve safety, reduce congestion and lower emissions,” South Australian Transport Minister Stephen Mullighan said in April, according to ABC News.

It also sees Australia keep up with the UK, which has also announced similar trials in the coming months, and the U.S., where testing has been happening since 2012. Tesla’s founder Elon Musk powered the driverless car debate forward to a new level in March, when he announced all of Tesla’s cars would receive an update this year to allow them to drive in „autopilot” mode.

Australians have an overall positive view of self-driving cars, according to a recent survey of 505 Australians, commissioned by the ARRB.

More than 60% of Australians surveyed said they had a „somewhat positive” or „very positive” impression of the robot vehicles. It also showed a majority believed crashes would be reduced, and the severity of them. Fuel economy and lowering vehicle emissions were also factors the public believe could be impacted by the introduction of automated cars.

These predictions are backed up by Google’s stats on its driverless cars. Since 2009, human drivers have hit the company’s cars 14 times, while the number of crashes caused by the self-driving cars sits at zero. „We’ll take all this as a signal that we’re starting to compare favorably with human drivers,” head of Google’s driverless car program Chris Urmson wrote in a blog post Thursday.