By the looks of things Volvo is hell-bent on becoming the most pioneering auto maker in the world. Their endless quest to come up with innovative technologies has resulted in some pretty clever stuff so far, such as the Road Magnets which keep autonomous cars in check. The latest development has to do with safety, and it uses a cloud-based platform for Car2Car communication systems.

In collaboration with the Swedish Transport Administration and the Norwegian Public Roads Administration, Volvo has already launched a pilot project to test their cloud-based Car2Car communication solution. In this test, road friction information from individual cars is shared within a cloud-based system, so all the cars in the vicinity would know about it.

Knowing about a slippery patch of road in advance is of course a good safety feature. But the capabilities that this system enables can go way further than that. The beauty of it is the ability to share real-time information with nearby vehicles.

In the pilot project, when a Volvo test car detects an icy or slippery road patch, it sends a signal to Volvo Cars’ database via the mobile phone network. That info is then transmitted to other vehicles that are approaching the slippery area in form of a warning on the instrument cluster.

Of course, as with all other technologies that have to gather and store data to operate, Volvo’s cloud-based Car2Car communication system could face privacy issues somewhere down the road. So they are taking care in advance, making it clear that the information shared with the road administrator will not include data of unique vehicles.