By If you’re European you may have noticed that roads have recently started to get cluttered even outside towns, that’s where SARTRE comes in.
SARTRE is a road safety project that has technology from Volvo behind it. The SARTRE project is supposed to help ease congestion, cut fuel consumption and improve safety.
Volvo’s idea revolves around creating semi-autonomous convoys of cars. The Swedish at Volvo are planning on running this project under a European Commission research “umbrella”.
SARTRE render
In what can be considered a win-win, Volvo creates new technology on safety, as always, Europeans save fuel and get safer roads and politics messes with our lives once more.
On a more serious front, SARTRE has one pretty substantial downside. The project basically implies using truckers as the lead for these convoys. Which in theory sounds great.
Truckers are always on the road, they always save fuel and their trucks are limited in terms of top speed. But there is somewhat of a fault in SARTRE. Truckers may get more pressure than ever before.
It’s not like trucking is an immensely easy job, now that SARTRE may come in and pin a number of cars relying on their driving people aren’t going to be happy.
Even so, the technology proposed by SARTRE and Volvo is relatively simple and implies that cars hook up electronically to platooning system. Basically you would tap a few buttons, get “hitched” electronically, and away you go.
Since the system is designed to keep distances and speeds monitored at all times it will always be easy to keep all cars following the same path.
SARTRE render
Therefore, if this system is enabled, SARTRE makes sure you drive well, reasonably fast while saving fuel without really driving. As this clip demonstrates, all you have to do is sit there.
As all new technology of this scale, it will take a long time to implement and get legal approval in every country in Europe but SARTRE is off to a good start.
The tests involving a single truck and a single car running on SARTRE have already been completed by Volvo.
