Saar: We think the Swedes are gearing up to showcase a fully-autonomous concept model.

So, Volvo Cars is up to something. Well, that’s actually a null sentence as all carmakers are up to something or the other all the time. What we actually meant was that the Swedish carmaker is gearing up to introduce something rather special. At least, that’s what we gather from the recent teaser video that the company posted on its social media account. Here, try and make sense of this:

By looking at the video alone, we got no clues whatsoever. But then we concentrated a bit hard on the caption used by Volvo Cars to tag the video. It reads:

“Coming soon: our vision for the future of travel. Could time spent travelling become time well spent? #360c”

Now, there are a number of takeaways from those, carefully selected, set of words. One, the model will represent Volvo’s ideas on the future of travel. The future, as mentioned a number of times by the Swedish carmaker, is fully autonomous and electric. That means this model is likely to house both those aspects. The next sentence in the caption ends with a question mark. The question only fuels our guess of a fully-autonomous vehicle which will let passengers catch up on the move. It will only be possible if the car and the surroundings can communicate with each other. In other words, a completely connected mobility ecosystem.

As far as the content of the video goes, it focuses on the front and rear end of the model. The front has two strips of LEDs running along the upper lip of the grille and blending neatly into the headlamp enclosures to form the iconic “Thor’s hammer” design. Right at the extreme end, there’s a light panel that erects beyond the car’s width. At the rear, the array of red-coloured LEDs forms a zig-zag route and the lights seem to flow inwards to the rear windscreen. And then is the ‘360’ logo at the fin.

The hashtag #360c will have some relevance but we are guessing that it will have nothing to do with the Volvo 360 from the last century. Before this teaser video, Volvo Cars had released a 10-second teaser. Here it is:

This one shows an equaliser that changes its pattern with the sound at the background. It could very well be a notification sound, like we get from our mobile applications, from the autonomous vehicle. In the coming weeks/months, expect Volvo to release more such teasers to flaunt its ideas of future mobility. Rest assured, we’ll be covering them all!