Volvo Cars will begin the UK’s largest autonomous driving trial next year, which will see up to 100 semi-autonomous cars on Britain's streets by 2018.

The company is positioning its Drive Me London test as part of a commitment to ensuring "no one will be seriously injured or killed in a new Volvo by the year 2020."

Volvo's test will use actual families driving autonomous cars on public roads. Image credit: Volvo.“Autonomous driving represents a leap forward in car safety,” says Håkan Samuelsson, Volvo president and chief executive. “The sooner [autonomous driving] cars are on the roads, the sooner lives will start being saved.”

According to Volvo, Drive Me London will help speed up the introduction of a technology to "massively reduce" car accidents and free up congested roads. The company says the test will differentiate itself from other autonomous driving programs by using real families driving autonomous cars on public roads.

Volvo will source data from these everyday consumers and use it to develop autonomous cars that are suitable for real-world driving conditions, rather than the more unrealistic conditions found on test tracks, the company says. Thatcham Research will provide the technical data analysis and any professional test drivers needed as part of the trial.

“Vehicle manufacturers are predicting that highly autonomous vehicles, capable of allowing the driver to drop ‘out of the loop’ for certain sections of their journey, will be available from around 2021," says Peter Shaw, chief executive at Thatcham Research. "Without doubt, crash frequency will also dramatically reduce. We’ve already seen this with the adoption of autonomous emergency braking on many new cars."

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration predicts that by 2035, as a result of autonomous and connected cars, crashes will be reduced by 80%, Shaw notes.