• by Tanya Gazdik , January 11, 2017

DETROIT — While most automakers were busy pulling the covers off vehicles at the North American International Auto Show, Volvo Cars had a different kind of reveal.

The automaker introduced the Hain family, who are the first consumers chosen by Volvo to take part in a real-life autonomous driving research project using real cars in real traffic in a project called “Drive Me," which has a dedicated Web site.

Autonomous vehicles were all the buzz throughout the Detroit auto show. Volvo said it believes that in the rush to deliver fully autonomous cars, many carmakers are forgetting the most important ingredient: the people who will use them. Volvo’s approach is to define the technology based on the role of the driver — not the other way around.

“It’s for families like them that we are developing autonomous drive,” Håkan Samuelsson, president and CEO, Volvo Car Group, told the media at the auto show. “Real people trying to balance their work and private life. People like you, and also people like me.”

The Hain family, from Gothenburg, Sweden, will be the first of 100 families to test the autonomous driving system that Volvo has developed on its XC90 model, he said. Samuelsson presented the family with the key before one of the daughters pulled the cover off the vehicle they will be testing. 

“We are going to take their real-life experience and learn from it. How can we design autonomous driving cars so that it makes people’s lives easier? That is really what we mean with ‘Designed around you,’” he said, referencing the company’s advertising tagline, now going into its sixth year in use. 

The Swedish carmaker, a leading partner in the Drive Me research project, aims to have its first fully autonomous car on the market by 2021. 

The Drive Me project is a collaborative research program consisting of several players from public, private and academic fields. It is probably the most advanced, ambitious and extensive real-life autonomous drive project in existence, the automaker says.

The project will take place on the roads around Gothenburg -- home to Volvo Cars -- driven by real people, in real traffic during 2017. The automaker aims to expand the project to other cities around the world, although details about when it might be coming to the U.S. were not announced. 

The automaker said it wants to learn more about how people feel when they engage and disengage autonomous drive, what the handover should be like, and what sort of things they would do in the car when it is driving them to their destination.

Volvo recently partnered with ride-sharing company Uber to share the development cost in creating the base technology for autonomous cars. Volvo also is launching a joint venture, Zenuity, with leading automotive safety supplier Autoliv, aimed at developing benchmark autonomous drive software and safety solutions for automakers. That software could be offered to other automakers for use in their autonomous vehicles.