The Sarte Project (Safe Road Trains for the Environment), which we have only picked up details of recently, was a European Commission funded research into vehicle platoons.
A vehicle platoon is a road train with vehicles, where vehicles are autonomously following a manually driven lead vehicle, driven by a professional driver.
The project had seven partners from four countries in Europe to discover the possibilities with vehicle platoons on public highways.
The project started on 1st September 2009 and appears to have completed in August 2012. The budget for the project was €6.4m with around 60% of this being provided by the European Commission FP7 programme.
At the end of the project Sarte said, “Thanks to the partners in the SARTRE road train project, you may soon be able to take your hands off the wheel and your eyes off the road in your own car – leaving the automated driving to modern technology.”
Thankfully the project produced a video, which saves us from trying to explain about the road train/vehicle platoon, you can watch the video below.
I can do something else than the actual driving
At about 40 secs into this video on self drive vehicles the person being interviewed says, “Convenience since I can do something else than the actual driving its safe since the system will take care of the driving it will eliminate the human errors”.
Further into the video the driver is sitting reading a magazine – there are other drivers using a lap top/tablet – is this the future?
There are also comments about fuel consumption – minor gap size between the vehicles – reduce air drag – improve fuel consumption.
So what do you think of that?
More details at the Sarte Project – www.sartre-project.eu
We first reported on this on the Right To Ride EU Facebook page – Click Here
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