Yeah, but can you drive it drunk?

 I suspect the answer to the title question would be an emphatic “no” for obvious reasons, but sadly that was about the first thing to come to mind when I saw this.  What “this” is would be SATRE (Safe Road Trains for the Environment) which is a driver-less car project which got the not for public spending approval from the EU at the end of last week.  

Shown above is the first test of the technology outside a simulator, which was carried out at Volvo's Hällered test track near Gothenburg in Sweden in December. The Volvo S60 is being directed and controlled by the truck, which is being driven by a professional driver.   The S60 also has a driver, but he is reading the paper and drinking a coffee and the articles I saw didn't mention his qualifications either in driving, coffee drinking or newspaper reading.  Such points do matter as we'd hate to think of any Health & Safety regs being breached here.

Volvo are in on this one on account of its existing lane assistance and adaptive cruise control car production technology - which monitors and controls the distance between cars - to form the basis of the automated convoy but the project is headed up by British company Ricardo UK.

Volvo technical leader for active safety functions Dr Erik Coelingh told silicon.com (where I lifted the photos and most of the info for this from!) the vast majority of accidents are caused by human error. He also anounded that the sky is blue and that the defecation habbits of wild bears are often related to the proximity of dense woodland areas.  

Official EU suggestions to what drivers may prefer to do than drive

The European Commission estimates that human factors cause at least 80 per cent of road traffic accidents, so automating some of the driving functions should cut down accident rates.  The automated road trains could also relieve traffic congestion due to the smaller gap between vehicles and consistent speed of platoons. Due to more efficient braking and acceleration, the project estimates up to 20 per cent fuel savings, which would also reduce CO2 emissions.

Volvo's Coelingh said more tests will take place in 2011 with more vehicles being added to the road train during the summer.  The expectation Volvo are setting on this one is for there to be public road trains in about 10 years.