Skip to main content

Sartre road train project enters final phase

The Sartre (Safe Road Trains for the Environment) project, funded by the European Union, has announced that it has successfully completed the first test demonstrations of a multiple vehicle platoon.
March 16, 2012 Read time: 1 min
The Sartre (Safe Road Trains for the Environment) project, funded by the 1116 European Union, has announced that it has successfully completed the first test demonstrations of a multiple vehicle platoon. The test fleet included a lead truck followed by three cars driven entirely autonomously at speeds of up to 90 km/h (57mph) – with no more than six metres gap between the vehicles. The project is being driven by seven European partners and is the only one of its kind to focus on the development of technology that can be implemented on conventional highways in which platooned traffic operates in a mixed environment with other road users.

Sartre, led by Ricardo UK, compromises a collaboration between 1578 Idiada and Robotiker-1582 Tecnalia of Spain, 3971 Institut für Kraftfahrwesen Aachen (IKA) of Germany, 1587 SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden, and 2394 Volvo Car Corporation and Volvo Technology (3970 Volvo Group) of Sweden.

Related Content

  • Driverless vehicles -safe at any speed?
    May 22, 2018
    The development of driverless vehicles is ongoing, with manufacturers in the US, Europe, Japan, South Korea and China all working on various projects. But as the recent pedestrian fatality involving a driverless car under test in Arizona highlights, safety is not entirely assured. One key problem is that the road environment is not straightforward and self-driving vehicles have to share roadspace with vehicles under human control. However, human behaviour is not easy to predict. Nor is there one mode of beh
  • Safety measures aid workzone accident reduction
    February 20, 2012
    Everyone connected with the highway industry is involved in the efforts to cut down the number of work zone accidents. Patrick Smith reports. A few months ago, as road work resumed on America's highways and bridges, US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood called on drivers to use extra caution in work zones. At the same time he commended the success in reducing overall roadway fatalities in each of the last seven years.
  • Making roads safer for the young
    February 27, 2018
    Children are at serious risk on Europe’s road network. This is the finding of a new report from the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC). According to the ETSC’s analysis of crash data, more than 8,000 children aged 0-14 years have been killed in road traffic collisions over the last 10 years in the European Union. Half of the children killed were travelling in cars, a third were walking and 13% were cycling, with one in every 13 child deaths in the European Union being the result of a road collision.
  • Nira and Univrses in Swedish road data project
    April 6, 2023
    NIRA Dynamics and Univrses are working on road surface conditions analysis using data from connected vehicles, RWIS, radar/satellite images and weather prognoses to provide a real-time picture of the road status.