Volvo will hand over this self-driving SUV to a Swedish family next year

Forget Ford's 2025 benchmark to sell self-driving cars to the public. Volvo is handing over a fleet of autonomous SUVs to Swedish families next year.

For a while now, Volvo has said it will launch its public self-driving vehicle experiment called "Drive Me" in Gothenburg, Sweden in 2017. Since this seemed a bit far off (and honestly a bit pie-in-the-sky), we didn't pay much attention. However, the months have slowly ticked by and now 2017 is just around the corner.

Accordingly, Volvo just finished production on its first (of 100) autonomous XC90 SUV that will be handed over to the public in several months.

Participants of Drive Me, the largest public autonomous vehicle "experiment," as Volvo calls it, will take delivery in Gothenburg only after each of the autonomous XC90s is thoroughly tested. Volvo wants to "ensure that the cars’ advanced autonomous driving technology functions exactly as they should."

Volvo isn't simply handing these cars over to the public to garner headlines. It aims to gather important feedback on the SUVs and their autonomous systems.

“Customers look at their cars differently than us engineers," said Erik Coelingh, senior technical leader of active safety at Volvo Cars. "So, we are looking forward to learn how they use these cars in their daily lives and what feedback they will give us.”

Following Gothenburg, the second phase of the Drive Me program will take place in China in the next few years.

All of these public autonomous driving experiments are intended to lead to Volvo's ultimate goal that "no one will be seriously injured or killed in a new Volvo by the year 2020."

Following that benchmark, Volvo plans to release autonomous cars to the public in 2021. Notably, this is the same date that Ford aims to have driverless ride-share cars on the road.