What would you do with 26 minutes of your morning and evening commute if you were encouraged to take your hands off the wheel and your eyes off the road? That’s the problem drivers will have when autonomous cars take over much of the daily drive, and it’s the one that Volvo is trying to solve with Concept 26, its innovative interior platform that elegantly shifts from driving command center to your own private “third space.”
Volvo unveiled its C26 sculpture, also known as the Time Machine, at the 2015 Los Angeles International Auto Show. This next-generation concept isn’t a car—rather, it’s an interior cabin that gets its name from the amount of time Volvo says the typical commuter can recapture and spend focused on something else when autonomous drive becomes a reality.
The C26 interior is different than any driver’s seat on the market today because it has a split personality. On one side of the coin, it’s a driver-centric cockpit suitable for the backroads. On the other, it’s a comfortable extension of your living room when you set the car in autonomous mode and delegate driving to the car. It’s a single solution for a no-compromise driver’s seat. Moreover, it’s what Volvo says customers really want.
Move over, Tesla
The Time Machine is the end product of a 6,000-person survey on what they want in the car of the future. What you see in Tesla Model Ss equipped with AutoSteer on the road today isn’t true autonomous drive. Legally, the system still requires the drive to pay attention to the road. To Volvo, these semi-autonomous systems are half-baked: a premature technology experiment at best, and at worst a dangerous parlor trick (and they’ve seen the YouTube videos to prove it). You may as well be driving if you need to hold the steering wheel.
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