Some Chevy Volts will be self-driving next year
Beginning in late fall 2016, if you鈥檙e lucky enough to visit the Warren Technical Center campus of General Motors [NYSE:GM], in Michigan, you might find your shuttle quite intriguing: a 2017 Chevrolet Volt, driving itself.
The automaker plans to deploy a fleet of Volt extended range聽聽to drive people autonomously within the campus.
To use the service, employees would use a smartphone application, reserving the聽and then selecting a destination. Using autonomous聽聽under development, the vehicle would then pick up the employee, bring them to the destination, and then park the vehicle.
鈥淭he program will serve as a rapid-development laboratory to provide data and lessons to accelerate the company鈥檚 technical capabilities in autonomous聽,鈥� said the automaker yesterday, in a press release accompanying a聽.
For the rest of us who aren鈥檛 GM insiders, we鈥檒l need to wait many years鈥攍ikely more than a decade鈥攆or the sort of technology demonstrated there, unrestricted for real-world driving. In the meantime, GM鈥檚 so-called Super Cruise autonomous-driving technology is an interim step, and the automaker confirms that it will first be offered in the 2017 Cadillac CTS.
Will any of those autonomous technologies make it into the regular-production 2017 Volt? We'd say that's highly unlikely, yet in the 2016 Volt you can already get blind-spot alert, rear cross-traffic alert, lane-keeping assist with lane-departure warning, forward collision alert, and automatic braking, plus an optional advanced parking assist function.聽
The completely new, second-generation Chevrolet Volt makes its debut for the 2016 model year and will be arriving to dealerships very soon. In the聽, which we've found a lot more refined as well as somewhat sportier and pleasant-driving, Chevy has boosted its all-electric range to 53 miles, while it gets 42 mpg when running solely on power from the 1.5-liter four-cylinder engine.
