Success for Volvo in Golf in South Africa

[[posterous-content:pid___0]]It would be difficult to imagine an event that encompasses a wider spectrum of golf - professional and amateur, individual and team, formal and informal, players from all over the world - than the week of the Volvo Golf Champions and the Volvo World Golf Challenge which has just finished at the fabulous Fancourt Estate in Western Cape, South Africa.

This unique and extensive mix of events is an unparalleled opportunity for Volvo to interact with customers and prospects. Thanks to massive media coverage, Volvo also gets to showcase the brand including vehicles on display on site.

The professional event - the Volvo Golf Champions - is a world-class tournament open only to last year's European Tour winners and players with at least ten victories in their career.

The event offers important marketing and relationship management opportunities - it is preceded by the exclusive Pro-Am and followed with After The Champions where customers and stakeholders get to play the stunning Links Course the day after the event with the course set up in the same way.

The Volvo Golf Champions came to a thrilling climax on Sunday, attracting thousands of spectators to the event, when the leading 11 finishers contained no fewer than 8 Major winners. Screened live on television across the globe to a potential worldwide audience of hundreds of millions of people, Ernie Els and Retief Goosen were joined by emerging star Brandon Grace in a play-off. Playing the last hole in sudden-death, Grace managed to win and claimed the winners' cheque of €350,000.

In parallel, the amateur competition - the World Final of the Volvo World Golf Challenge - was the culmination of hundreds of qualifying competitions held in more than 25 countries and attracting in excess of 50,000 enthusiastic club golfers. The 55 finalists played two rounds and Italian Johannes Zelger held his nerve to win by two shots from Austrian Henning Frech, with young Swede Mikael Hedberg in third. An additional excitement which is attracting ever-increasing interest is that the following day, the top-finishers each got the chance to take part in ‘Playing With The Pros', live on television on the European Tour.

South African hero Retief Goosen and English star Lee Slattery partnered Volvo-customer and amateur Mark Vandenberghe from the UK to victory. The Pros were excited about each winning a Volvo V60, whilst Mark had the time of his life, a day he will never forget.

This unique combination of the amateurs joining the pros for one round during their tournament has been a driving force in attracting club golfers from all over the world into playing in Volvo events.

**  Courtesy of Volvo Cars Newsroom

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Volvo's research with SATRE for 'Road Trains' - Video

Volvo Car Corporation Part of Successful Road Train Test

The SARTRE project (Safe Road Trains for the Environment) - with Volvo Car Corporation as the only participating car manufacturer - 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 - with no more than 6 metres gap between the vehicles.

"The aim is for the entire road train to be completed in autumn 2012. By then we will have four vehicles after one lead vehicle driving at 90 km/h," says Erik Coelingh, technical project manager at the Volvo Car Corporation.

The SARTRE 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.

Stakeholder dialogue

Recognizing that the challenge of implementing road train technology on Europe's highways is not solely a technical matter, SARTRE also includes a major study to identify what infrastructure changes will be needed for vehicle platooning to become a reality. A number of stakeholder discussions will therefore be held. The participants in the first discussion included technical experts, politicians, legislators and traffic safety researchers. At the workshop a number of non-technical challenges for road trains were discussed, such as legal regulations, product liability and driver acceptance of automated vehicles.

Key future requirements identified were the need to agree a common terminology for platooning, such as criteria for defining when a vehicle becomes fully, as opposed to partially or even highly automated, and the need to address multiple and varied national regulatory law or to harmonize regulatory law. 

Many benefits

The main advantage of road trains is that the car driver has time over to do other things. Road trains promote safer transport since the vehicle platoons are led by a professional driver in e.g. a truck and inter-vehicle reaction response times are much quicker. Environmental impact is reduced since the cars follow close behind each other and benefit from the lower air drag. The energy saving is expected to be in the region of up to 20 percent. Road capacity will also be able to be utilised more efficiently.

 

**  Courtesy of Volvo Cars Newsroom

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