It won’t be much longer until cars are able to drive themselves, but until that day, automakers will continue to incorporate autonomous technologies into future vehicles for the sake of safety and convenience. Just about every automaker currently uses some sort of active vehicle control whether it be for parking, braking or staying in an intended lane, and Volvo continues to be on the forefront of such technologies by demonstrating what it refers to as a traffic jam assistance system.

Volvo says that, on average, US drivers spend more than 100 hours per year in commuting, so it developed this new system to make some of the more stressful parts of commuting in bumper-to-bumper traffic a little easier to deal with. This new system controls the car’s brakes, accelerator and steering, allowing it to actually follow the car in front including through bends in the road and around obstacles rather than just being able to keep speed (as with active cruise control systems). Volvo’s is a driver-selectable system, too, that is intended to operate in slow-moving traffic at speeds of up to 31 miles per hour.

Volvo is planning to start introducing this technology into production vehicles by 2014 as a part of the Scalable Product Architecture (SPA) project which sounds like it should help spread technologies more quickly across its lineup through economies of scale. Traffic jam assistance will use the same radars and cameras currently used by the City Safety and Pedestrian Detection technologies.