Full house at the Revere inauguration
On November 19, Chalmers' new resource for vehicle research, Revere, was inaugurated in brand new facilities at Lindholmen. About 100 hundred people joined in to celebrate the occasion.
The Revere project was initiated by Safer - the Vehicle and Traffic Safety Centre at Chalmers - in 2013 and it took over two years to find the right partners, secure funding and get the actual research facility in place.
"We saw a need to link theory and real-traffic driving through a full-scale vehicle research lab", says Anna Nilsson-Ehle, Director at Safer. She continues: "We want to be one of the top research environments for accident avoidance and automated driving, and that requires a laboratory and experimental resources - and we have that now."
"From the Chalmers' perspective this is a building block for both our undergraduate and graduate programmes, as well as for our advanced research", says Stefan Bengtsson, President and CEO at Chalmers, "it also gives us an opportunity to take our collaboration with AB Volvo and Volvo Cars to the next level."
Peter Kronberg, Safety Director, represented Volvo Group. When asked for a comment, he says: "We are excited about Revere. The lab fills a very important gap in our already strong collaboration with Chalmers and Safer by enabling researchers to get a much greater understanding of the heavy vehicle industry and its technology challenges. The fact that research results and simulations can now be readily applied and validated in real life settings is a great step forward. And Revere will be an arena where Chalmers researchers and students and Volvo engineers can meet. I am confident that great things will emerge from this place!".
The Vice President of Strategy and Vehicle Concepts at Volvo Cars, Sven-Erik Svensson, states that Volvo cars - as a 'stand-alone' company in a very competitive environment - needs to utilize local academic alliances, networks and collaborations for external research. He says: "We need to strengthen strategic academic partnerships within research and innovation and, thereby, access global academic research and innovation environments in critical technology areas. We believe that Revere, in this context, is an important arena for supply of competence, not only for us, but for the entire region vehicle research cluster."
Johnny Magnusson, President of the Regional Executive Board at Region Västra Götaland agrees. He says: "A close collaboration between academia and the industry is, of course, of great importance to our region. When we see a possibility to strengthen the bond between these two, we try to take that opportunity, as we have here today."
