Hanging out in Volvo’s “Concept 26,” a reinvented seat for a self-driving car

CAMARILLO, CALIF.—When people imagine the future of self-driving cars, they might think of steering wheel-less pods with swivel chairs and a lounge-like cabin atmosphere. Just program your destination into the vehicle and take a seat, as blissfully unaware of the ensuing traffic as you would be on a train.

But Volvo doesn’t agree with that vision, at least at this point. Speaking to a small gathering of journalists at its Motoring & Concept Center, a nondescript building just off the 101 freeway, company executives maintained that people really do want to drive—they just don’t want to drive when driving is boring.

Building on that belief, Volvo created what it calls "Concept 26,” a re-imagined car interior with seats built for the autonomous vehicle customer who wants to drive a luxury vehicle sometimes, but who also wants to delegate the time spent commuting (26 minutes on average for the American driver, hence the name “Concept 26”). It’s important to Volvo’s customers to be able to drive their cars, Anders Tylman-Mikiewicz, the head of Volvo's Monitoring and Concept Center, said, but it’s also important that they "get the option to delegate driving when it’s boring.”

I needed little convincing—I had already spent two hours in LA traffic trying to get to the meeting with Volvo.

Volvo explained that the dual-function vehicle of the future, then, will not have swivel chairs (Tylman-Mikiewicz says that’s in part because people always choose forward-facing seats in any type of moving cabin when they can, lest they get motion sickness). Instead, it will have a chair designed for free movement between reclining and upright positions, a massive hidden screen where the glove box normally is, and a touch screen tablet in place of the center console that moves laterally so as to always be within reach of the driver’s hand.

The tour

For more than 30 years, Volvo's Motoring & Concept Center in Camarillo has served as the company's primary office for concept car design outside of Gothenburg, Sweden. The work done there is a carefully guarded secret, as evidenced by the fact that Volvo’s spokespeople insisted on collecting everyone’s cellphones and cameras before we passed through the lobby or asked that we leave our gear in our cars outside.

We were led through several rooms, all of which had been copiously scrubbed in advance of the press visit of just about every image, poster, stack of papers, or white board notation that an office would normally have. Clearly, Volvo’s concept car team was not messing around.

We passed through a hall and down some stairs to a warehouse space with museum-like exhibits that Volvo had set up, complete with posters explaining each installation. On display were a number of prototypes that Volvo had used to build Concept 26, starting with the redesigned chair.

Doug Frasher, director of Advanced Research and Development at the Volvo Monitoring and Concept Center, said that the key to Volvo's new, autonomous-drive-friendly seats is that the seat bottom is split into two halves, a front panel primarily supporting the legs and a back panel supporting the pelvis. He said he got the idea while trying to solve what is known in the industry as “submarining”—the tendency to slide down the seat when you recline. With the two-panel seat bottom, the attitude of the pelvis can be controlled, keeping your butt from sliding forward in a way that’s both uncomfortable and dangerous.

Frasher’s team also closely engineered how the chair reclined. In Concept 26, the seat has a “free mode,” which allows the chair’s occupant to recline with the alacrity of an office chair—no pulling levers or pushing motorized buttons.

Of course, this ease of movement can be dangerous in a moving vehicle. Frasher stepped us over to a more fleshed-out prototype connected to a host of wires and a tablet. The next task after designing the mechanical basics of the seat was to make sure that the car could lock passengers out of “free mode" based on the accelerations that the car’s autonomous mode perceives ahead (vehicles would never be allowed to unlock free mode while the car was being driven manually).

This particular prototype also showed some of the concept’s software fleshed out. While the car is driving autonomously, passengers would have several “modes” to choose from like “create mode,” which opens the seat to free mode so you can lean back and answer some e-mails; or “relax mode,” which turns out the screen hidden under the glove box so you can watch a TV show if you choose.

One Volvo executive told me that the impetus for putting a center console tablet screen and a much larger passenger-side screen in the car was to encourage users to stay on Volvo hardware, because it could be dangerous to put a laptop on the driver’s lap while the car is driving autonomously. “You don’t want a laptop between you and an airbag,” he said.

We then came to a life-size bead foam structure that Volvo used to vet the final design of the concept interior. This was neat to see up close (bead foam structures have always looked beautiful to me). But again, we couldn’t get any pictures. “There are about nine patents [pending] in this room,” a Volvo spokesperson said to me. The company can’t afford a stray photo from a journalist to give anything away, he added. (The one exception, of course, was that Volvo allowed me to take photos of the fully finished concept, and a team of Volvo-hired personnel took video.)

The sculpture

At the end of the tour, Volvo offered its guests a chance to sit in “the sculpture”—car design-speak for a working model of a concept design. You can check out how that went in the video above.

Of course, this is just a concept, and Volvo employees all noted that portions of this concept may make it into cars sooner than later, but you won’t see a totally re-designed interior like this in 2016’s lineup.

Still, the concept shows that Volvo is taking its future in autonomous driving seriously, something that has been apparent in recent years as the company has bounded several strides ahead of many of its competitors when it comes to handing degrees of autonomy over to the car. Already, lane assist technology in the Volvo XC90 allows you to take your hands off the wheel on a highway at speeds slower than 30mph.

Volvo’s leadership has also been vocally supportive of autonomous driving initiatives. As Volvo CEO Håkan Samuelsson said at a debate hosted at the Swedish Embassy in Washington in October, "When you drive manually, the driver is responsible. When it's automatic, we as the manufacturer are liable. If you're not ready to make such a statement, you're not ready to develop autonomous solutions."

Marcus Rothoff, Volvo’s Autonomous Driving Program Director, told the group that the company is keenly aware that trust will be a major factor in deciding which companies win out as autonomous driving becomes more of a reality. “Trust cannot really be claimed, you have to earn that,” Rothoff said, citing Volvo’s recent assertion that no one will be killed or seriously injured in a Volvo by 2020.

For now, Rothoff said, the next step is to get fully autonomous Volvos out of the hands of engineers (who are already testing self-driving Volvos around Gothenburg) and into the hands of real people as part of Volvo’s recently announced “Drive Me” program. This pilot program, which is set to commence in 2017, will get 100 drivers out on the streets in Gothenburg in autonomous vehicles.

While those cars almost certainly won't have Concept 26 in them as-is, the pieces of the concept interior are compatible with Volvo's Scalable Product Architecture (SPA), which allows the company to more quickly integrate autonomous features in new models. So derivatives of Concept 26 could show up, and Volvo hopes it will be sooner than later. As Tylman-Mikiewicz said to the group, "Volvo is not really here to play, we’re here to disrupt." 

Listing image by Volvo, Maggetti Productions, Inc., and Ashley Fisher