A safe pair of hands

Åsa Laveno, Senior Project Manager, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Drive Me.

Among other things, Åsa Laveno ran the 24-strong team of software developers behind Volvo Car's City Safety – the most advanced standard safety package currently available anywhere in the world. We caught up with her at Volvo Car's development labs in Torslanda.

VQ: Briefly, can you explain what City Safety is – what it does?
Ok, so say you’re driving along and you get distracted for a moment. Maybe you sneeze. And someone walks out into the road or the car in front stops suddenly. City Safety warns you with an audio alarm and a short brake pulse, to get you to look up. If all goes well, you see the hazard and hit the brakes yourself. If you don't brake in time, City Safety will brake for you. First, it applies a pre-brake and pre-tightens the seatbelt. Then, if it really needs to, it brakes fully. The purpose is to prevent a collision if possible and limit injury and damage if not.

VQ: So it's an autonomous braking system that prevents collisions with people and cars...

And in the S90 and V90, we've added animals. Large animals.

VQ: Such as...
Moose, elks and horses.

VQ: So what's the technology behind the system?
At the core of City Safety is the threat assessor – a piece of software that's constantly analysing input from camera and radar, looking for potential threats. The software actually creates a kind of model of the reality, based on the data that's streaming in from the camera and radar. If the system detects something that presents a threat, the driver hears an audio alert and gets a pulse from the brake at the same time.

“There are the obvious financial benefits of lower repair costs and insurance premiums and excesses.”

VQ: So is City Safety essentially a stepping stone to autonomous driving?
I think that’s a sort of a two-way development path. The sensors, the radar and the camera never get tired; they don’t blink; and they don’t get distracted. And they don’t sneeze. So it's a more reliable system that’s always on. But people will always want to drive themselves. City Safety provides support for when you’re driving yourself.

VQ: And the benefits for fleet customers are...
Well there are many benefits of drivers having fewer collisions, as you can imagine. There are the obvious financial benefits of lower repair costs and insurance premiums and excesses. But just as important, if not more so, is the fact that their employees are safer. As well as fulfilling their employer's duty of care, there is potentially a reduction in productivity losses through injury and a lower risk of legal consequences. There are studies that suggest that the total actual cost of a collision is up to five times greater than the so-called bent metal cost alone. That's what makes City Safety such an attractive proposition to fleet customers.

VQ: How complex is it to service and maintain?
The service isn’t really that complex. You do have to make sure that you use Volvo Genuine Parts for things like windscreen replacements and so on. But apart from that, the only requirement is the occasional software update, and that comes as a standard part of the Volvo Service now.

VQ: Do other manufacturers offer this level of system?
Not as standard currently, but it’s coming because it’s a part of Euro NCAP. Since 2014, NCAP has required a car to have an AEB [Autonomous Emergency Braking] system to get the full five-star NCAP rating. In 2016, they added AEB with pedestrian warnings. The next step is in 2018 when they’re probably adding cyclist detection as well, which we already have as an option. We launched City Safety on the XC60 in 2007, so Volvo’s a long way ahead of the field in this respect. We take our Vision 2020 very seriously – that no one should be seriously injured or killed in a Volvo. So that’s the basis for offering it as standard.

VQ: On a personal note, what's your favourite part of the job?
The whole sense of being able to create something unique, that's the best in the world... I'm enormously proud of that. And we help to save people’s lives. I think that’s extraordinary. I have guys in my department – they’re young guys – saying that we should actually pay to be able to come and work here because it’s so fulfilling. Maybe it’s typically Swedish to think and reason like that.

Read more articles at VQ online.