Volvo's self-driving 7900 bus goes online, changing the urban environment

Volvo's self-driving electric bus has arrived, and it could usher in a new era for city dwellers. The company unveiled its 40-foot, 79,000-foot creation earlier this month at a test site at the University of Singapore, which it says is a world first. If successful, it could lead to an era of cleaner, greener, smarter fleets that make cities more livable.

“In a fully autonomous world, when everyone can sit in an autonomous eggshell, I often ask the question: Is public transport really necessary and has a future? ” said Håkan Agnevall, President of Volvo Buses. “We will not be able to solve the traffic congestion problem if we travel one by one.”

In Agneval's vision, self-driving technology isn't just about falling asleep at the wheel of a five-passenger Tesla sedan. It's about improving safety, smoothing operations, and making services more efficient for everyone. Even with autonomy, there will still be bus stops with routes, avoiding the chaos of hundreds of people hailing a ride at every point on the street, but people's journeys will be augmented by new kinds of machines.

“It’s all about creating traffic and flow,” Agnwal said. “Then if you have a small last-mile connectivity system, that’s more tailor-made.”

Will the cities of the future have space for everyone?

It’s a vision that may have found its moment, as “mobility-as-a-service” apps seek to connect fleet-sharing and other modes of transportation through a simplified interface for future city dwellers. The United Nations estimates that urban populations will increase to 68% by 2050, up from 55% in 2018. BP also predicts that the number of passenger cars on the road will double to nearly 2 billion by 2040, while another study in the journal Cell puts that date around 2030.

The problem of more vehicles on the road is already being addressed. The average speed in central London is just 6 mph, and Agnwal attributes this in part to the number of package delivery vehicles on the road. Autonomous technology could allow them to operate at all times of the day, while e-vehicles could open up more night shifts.

“Today you can’t drive a diesel truck at night because of the noise,” Agnwal said. “But if you had a silent truck, you could use it at night to look at the distribution so it doesn’t hold up traffic during the day.”

The 7900 could become a feature of this future city. It is a joint project between Volvo Buses and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The university has been testing autonomous vehicle technology since 2012, and the work began two years ago.

The bus is moving.

Although the 7900 doesn’t require human intervention, Volvo has decided to use a safety driver ready to take over at any time. Agnevall said that “in general applications, it will take a few years to completely remove the driver,” but for “certain applications, such as depot driving, it can come much sooner.” It sounds like a small change, but Agnevall pointed out that about 40% of bus damages occur in small depots, meaning such a breakthrough could reduce accidents.

In terms of specs, the bus checks many of the boxes you'd expect from a normal city vehicle. It seats 36, with support for another 57. Its all-electric design consumes 80 percent less energy than an equivalent diesel vehicle, and is paired with an ABB-developed HVC 300P charger to deliver 300 kilowatts of power and get the vehicle ready to go in three to six minutes.

Autonomous driving is powered by lidar, stereo vision cameras, and a satellite navigation system that Volvo describes as centimeter-level accuracy "like any GPS." Gyroscopes and accelerometers measure the bus to ensure a smoother ride. These advances build on each other, benefiting the entire company — though it's important to note that Volvo Cars is an independent company, so cars like the Tesla Model 3 competitor Polestar 2 won't use the same underpinnings.

“We treat this new technology as a whole,” Agnwal said. “We have a common platform that we share across different applications and vehicles, trucks, buses, construction equipment. There’s going to be more happening in this technology space in the next 10 years than there has been in the last 30 or 40 years. So it’s really exciting times.”

Unfortunately, the timeline for the bus's release is unclear. Volvo plans to conduct initial tests on a short test route on campus roads and test a second bus at a depot of Singapore's public transport agency SMRT, but has yet to announce plans for a wider release.

"Autonomous driving is a complex process," Agnwal said. "So it's going to be a staggered approach, but development is really coming, and it all starts with safety first."

Mercedes-Benz has been exploring autonomous buses on the streets of Amsterdam and a small shuttle that picks up passengers in Las Vegas, and the 7900 sedan could make its road debut among smart cars of all shapes and sizes.