Self-driving convoys, remote control from outside the cab, all-electric engines — Volvo Trucks shows off several new freight technologies

Volvo Trucks demonstrated a series of new commercial-vehicle technologies at home in Gothenburg, Sweden.

A convoy of three trucks is running down a highway. All three are heavy trucks 20 meters long, but the drivers of the last two aren't driving; their trucks follow the one in front on their own. A driver climbs down from the cab of a garbage truck and walks toward a bin at the roadside; behind him the garbage truck reverses and follows him, with no one aboard. On a test ground, a driverless dump truck eases through a turn while the driver himself stands a few meters off holding a remote, driving it the way you would drive a toy.

These scenes were part of what Volvo Trucks showed of the commercial vehicle's future in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Volvo Trucks is one of the big truck makers, building everything from city trucks rated under 10 tons to models rated above 100 tons. It sold about 200,000 units in 2017, with its main markets in Europe and the United States.

Volvo Trucks is part of the Volvo Group, which also owns Volvo Buses, Volvo Construction Equipment and other subsidiaries. Volvo Cars, which makes passenger cars under the same brand, is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Geely Group. Geely has invested in Volvo Trucks but is not a major shareholder there.

Besides the three scenes above, Volvo Trucks showed other technologies, some still in development, some already in mass production. All of them look aimed at particular problems commercial vehicles have today, and the future they describe is not much like the one being sold for passenger cars.

Autonomous driving is a focus for Volvo Trucks too, but not the kind Tesla is building

What Volvo means by autonomous driving is not quite what Tesla, Ford, General Motors and others advertise. The "self-driving convoy" Volvo Trucks demonstrated live at its test track is one example.

Three Volvo FH heavy trucks hauling containers stood in a row on the test track, and QDaily took the passenger seat of the second one. When the lead truck pulled away, our truck followed with a driver at the wheel, holding a gap of about 15 meters — much closer than a normal highway following distance. After roughly 10 seconds, a screen retrofitted into the cab showed that the three trucks were linked.

The driver then took his hands and feet off the controls and the truck began driving itself behind the lead vehicle: turning, steering around obstacles, stopping and pulling away again, all of it automatic. The third truck behind us did the same.

This is not the autonomous driving now being researched for passenger cars. Cars rely mainly on radar, maps and artificial intelligence, and what they are chiefly after is driving themselves on paved roads.

The convoy technology Volvo Trucks showed is much simpler. The three trucks are linked only by radio, using sensors to synchronize data on speed, braking, throttle, gear and steering. As long as the lead truck is driven normally, the trucks behind can track it automatically. The point is to spare the drivers' strength on long hauls.

Volvo's product development staff offered a scenario: on a long haul, three trucks would still need at least three drivers, but apart from the one in the lead truck, the others could take it easy. Rotate the lead every few hours and such a convoy could cut rest time and cover more ground in the same day.

The technology runs into several problems.

The first is legal. Volvo Trucks says its self-driving convoys have been tested over long distances in Europe, and real legal trouble has already shown up. In Sweden, Volvo Trucks can set the following distance itself. In Germany, the government requires at least 50 meters between vehicles. In the Netherlands, the rule is whatever Germany's distance is. Open the gap too wide and the trailing truck can no longer act on the lead truck's movements.

If the technology is to spread, the law has to be harmonized first, because a legal constraint is a performance constraint: in a system built entirely on following the truck ahead, the gap between vehicles is the core parameter, and that gap also has to be legal.

It rained on and off in Gothenburg on the day of the test, and during the convoy demonstration the two trailing trucks did not always form the "automatic convoy" quickly. On one run that we watched from the roadside instead of riding along, we heard a driver report over the radio that the trucks apparently hadn't synced that time, and that it had taken several hundred extra meters.

The engineers say weather should not affect the technology in theory, but they are still testing it, especially across different road conditions — varying curve radii, lane widths and so on.

The technology suits Europe's transport environment better. In Europe, bulk goods move by road, on fixed routes with different end points: car-carrier trucks leaving an auto plant all head for the same other city, but each has to reach a different dealership. In that setting, convoy technology can raise transport efficiency and save labor.

Conditions are similar in the United States and China, so the technology could be useful there too. In some countries it may not be needed at all — Australia, for instance, where the roads are simple and a form of "road train" already exists.

Volvo also showed three "autonomous driving" scenarios with a higher degree of automation, but because they are so tightly tied to specific settings, two of them were shown only on video.

One video showed a truck driving itself through an underground mine: at an iron mine in Sweden, a modified Volvo FMX, guided by lidar, crawled through dimly lit tunnels with no driver aboard. As it came up on a driver standing in the shaft, it stopped exactly.

Another video showed a truck following a harvester: in a sugarcane field in Brazil, a Volvo VM fitted with GPS and sensors — with a person in the driver's seat — held an extremely precise line alongside the cane harvester at work. The truck moved down the unplanted gap between two rows of cane roots while its bed caught the waste the harvester threw out.

In both cases Volvo stressed that this is research shaped by customers, and that the aim is higher output: on a farm or in a mine, if production leans too heavily on the driver, its pace has to bend to human hours and human rest. With autonomous driving, work can go on without a break, and more safely — lidar is far better than the eye in the dark, and sensors hold a straighter line across a field than a person can.

We saw the last of the "scenario-based" examples for real.

In a closed demonstration area, several standard orange city bins had been set out about 30 meters apart. A driver pulled up in an orange garbage truck that looked far from new, climbed down from the cab and pressed a button mounted on the outside of the body. As he walked toward a bin, the driverless truck set off on its own and followed him to it.

He hooked the bin onto the back of the truck by hand, pressed a button to empty it, unhooked it, and the truck followed him to the next one. Along the way it seemed able to tell which bins had already been tipped and skip them.

Lidar units are fitted at the four corners of the vehicle, and a red emergency-stop button on the side of the body.

Volvo Trucks staff said this truck is another autonomous-driving research project, but that it is already working with a waste-collection company in Gothenburg on real collection tests. The system is not fully automatic: a worker has to mark the rough position of the houses on a GPS map beforehand, then drive the truck to that neighborhood and start the automatic program.

Once the program is running, the truck can follow the driver and keep clear of other vehicles and pedestrians.

Locally this looks very handy. While QDaily was reporting there, the bus we were riding took a narrow street in a residential area and met a garbage truck at work. It carried two workers, and they had plenty to do: one drove the truck from bin to bin; the other walked behind it, dragged the bins over one at a time and pressed the button to empty them. And to get through all the bins, the driver had to keep climbing in and out of a cab more than a meter off the ground, stopping, starting and tipping bins again and again.

In Volvo's vision, a garbage truck with this technology would no longer need the extra worker, because one worker could finish the round without climbing up and down. And on the complicated streets of a residential area, such a vehicle would also be safer.

The "autonomous driving" Volvo Trucks is working on is less automated than what passenger cars are getting, and leans less on sensors and artificial intelligence than on experience running trucks.

What it wants to sell customers are useful functions that relatively simple technology can already deliver, before safe, fully autonomous driving arrives.

Buyers of commercial vehicles all have clear business models; they weigh input against output, not much else. If autonomous driving can make more money, more safely, with fewer people, it will be bought.

Several features already in mass production can be read as the groundwork for automation

Volvo Trucks also showed off several other automated features as part of its product pitch. They are less demanding technically but further along: they reached the market in June and can already be ordered as options on new trucks. Most could be demonstrated on site; only one came by video.

Volvo showed a truck that can be driven by remote control, like a toy.

A driver had a remote about the size of a dinner plate strapped to his waist, much like a game controller, with several sticks, buttons and switches. Within 10 meters of the truck, it could control everything the vehicle does: ignition, gear changes, forward and reverse, steering, lights and the rest.

It is also precise. With a gentle push of the stick, the driver could make this FH16 heavy truck — carrying a 660-horsepower, 3,000-newton-meter six-cylinder diesel — creep forward and turn at 5 centimeters per second.

Volvo says the main point of this technology is again to lighten the driver's workload. On a cramped work site, a driver sometimes has to get out and check whether the truck will fit through a tight spot, and climbing in and out is awkward and slow. Remote-control driving fixes that.

The driver working the truck told QDaily that learning to drive this "remote-control truck" took him three days, and that he found it fairly easy to pick up.

Another technology on show was a truck that brakes by itself.

At the end of a closed test road stood a soft crash barrier dressed up as a car; from behind, its size and color looked just like a station wagon. QDaily rode in a production FH container truck as it charged the obstacle at about 50 kilometers an hour.

About 50 meters out, a red warning light on the windshield started flashing and an emergency message appeared on the instrument panel, but the driver did not brake. At about 20 meters the truck began to brake, though not at full force. At 10 meters it braked fully, and stopped less than a meter from the obstacle.

The system is built on ordinary visible-light cameras and millimeter-wave radar. Volvo says its onboard computer monitors the vehicle's dynamic load in real time to work out how much the truck is actually carrying. That number decides when the truck brakes hard and with how much force, all so the truck does not hit the car ahead when the driver does nothing. Volvo says the system can currently detect cars, motorcycles and bicycles, but not pedestrians.

Volvo was not the first to put either of these into mass production. Remote-control trucks and emergency braking have been on sale on Mercedes-Benz trucks since at least 2017, and other companies offer similar features. Mercedes-Benz's automatic braking can also detect pedestrians crossing the road, on top of cars and motorcycles.

One more production technology was shown only on video: when a Volvo truck is being overtaken on the highway by a smaller car, it can hold its lane automatically, so it does not swing over and hit the car alongside.

More than 1.2 million people die in traffic accidents every year, by one count. Volvo stressed that it wants its trucks to avoid accidents outright: through automated features, Volvo Trucks' vision is that its trucks avoid rear-end collisions, rollovers, running off the road and the rest.

On accident avoidance, Volvo Trucks' pitch looks much like a passenger-car maker's.

Volvo has launched electric trucks too, betting on governments pushing green plans

In April, Volvo announced that it had begun selling the Volvo FL series of electric trucks. In Gothenburg, we got a ride in one.

Volvo had two FL electric trucks on site, a box truck and a slightly shorter garbage truck. In a test ride of only a few minutes, the electric truck pulled away in a straight line and drove city streets with far more acceleration than a conventional diesel.

From the driver's seat, it had almost no vibration and no noise, and it was easier to drive than a diesel. From the sidewalk, it no longer made the irritating clatter peculiar to diesel engines, and it emitted nothing at all when pulling away.

Volvo laid out the electric truck's specifications in detail: different models take different numbers of battery packs, each pack holding 50 kilowatt-hours and weighing 520 kilograms. A truck can carry anywhere from two to six of them, so 100 to 300 kilowatt-hours in total. In all, Volvo's electric trucks manage 200 to 300 kilometers on the combined city test cycle.

Volvo did not name its battery supplier, but on the demonstration vehicle we could see the packs came from the German company Akasol, which makes industrial lithium-polymer batteries and sells modular design — buy them and use them as they are.

Akasol is unlike suppliers such as Panasonic and Samsung SDI, which make only cells: the pouch cells in the Nissan Leaf, say, or the 18650 cylindrical cells Tesla uses. Akasol supplies modular units directly, which means Volvo may not need to spend much on battery research at all.

From the detail Volvo showed, both the FL and the FE electric trucks are conversions of their diesel versions: an electrical module where the diesel engine sat, a two-speed transmission and electric motor where the gearbox sat, battery packs where the fuel tank and urea tank sat. Structurally, the load-bearing chassis, driveshaft and suspension did not have to be redesigned.

Volvo also set out several charging posts built with ABB, one AC and one DC, able to supply fast charging at 20 to 150 kilowatts. Volvo says fast-charging networks and electric trucks suit urban freight, because they are cleaner and quieter.

Volvo already runs a sizable fleet of diesel-electric hybrid buses in Gothenburg, using overhead fast-charging pantographs: the bus stops at the stop and a retractable contact pantograph on the roof drops down to charge it. Because a hybrid's battery is small, it can charge fully in six minutes and drive off, which is handier than an ordinary charging station.

Under the Swedish government's plan, on top of enforcing Europe's ever stricter emissions rules, diesel is to be phased out entirely and replaced by methanol, ethanol, methane, electricity and other fuels that renewable energy can produce. Volvo says Volvo Trucks' vision is "zero emissions," and that electric vehicles are the first step.

At this stage, though, an electric truck costs far more than a diesel one. European policy incentives for electric commercial vehicles come mainly from the customer's side: the German government, for instance, has decided to run a pilot inside Germany before January 1, 2019, exempting electric trucks from highway tolls.

Free tolls, plus better performance in cities, may generate more demand for electric vehicles, and that demand can push manufacturers to put products on the market — the Mercedes-Benz and Volvo electric trucks, for example. China's incentives for electric commercial vehicles are more direct by comparison: bigger subsidies straight to manufacturers, demand manufactured by administrative order.

In the end, though, somebody has to pay. Electric trucks will be adopted at scale only when they make commercial sense, not merely because they are clean.

Volvo has capital ties to Geely, but its new technology may be some way from China

Scenario-based autonomous driving needs a particular setting. A unified municipal system for sorting and collecting household waste, plus scattered residential areas, suits an autonomous garbage truck — and most of China has neither.

As for the long-distance autonomous driving that convoys suit: Chinese law sets no strict rules on drivers' working hours, and does not enforce any, and truck driving in China is still some way from being a middle-income occupation, so companies feel far less urgency than European ones about easing the pressure on drivers.

Volvo can make a diesel truck shift gears as smoothly as a passenger car. But when it comes to safety features like automatic braking, an imported truck costs more than 1 million yuan while a domestic one costs 300,000-odd — an unbeatable advantage — and comfort and safety start to matter less.

Asked whether it would open its autonomous-driving platform, Volvo Trucks said yes. It has no partners at the moment, it said, but would welcome an alliance with other manufacturers.

That may be no more than a posture, since every automaker is building its own autonomous-driving technology. But spreading such technology could be good news for the price-sensitive Chinese market: in 2016 there were 50,400 road accidents nationwide in which a truck was at fault, killing 25,000 people and injuring 46,800, which came to 30.5% of all accidents caused by vehicles — far above trucks' share of the vehicle fleet.

With automatic braking and automatic following, long-haul and city trucks may cause a few accidents less.

Photos by QDaily