A few years ago, a 1981 DeLorean DMC-12 known as MARTY made headlines when it showcased autonomous drifting. “Big deal”, you mutter, “they got a remote-controlled car to drift. What’s the point?” Well, for one, it’s not remote controlled. It’s fully autonomous. It’ll do everything itself without any human interaction once the course is uploaded into it’s system. But the bigger deal is that the DeLorean drifts at all.
In the current state of autonomous cars, the basic premise is to make them behave like a fifteen-year-old trying to impress the driving test administrator on the drive: careful, straightforward driving. Proper turns, staying between the lines, and not mowing over pedestrians stuff. You just need enough power to maintain speed and enough brakes to stop safely. In drifting, that kind of prude motoring goes flying out of the window. You need enough guts to keep the rear tires lit up, you need to be able to figure out slip angles on the fly, and you need to have surgical precision in order to not…you know…hit anything.
For their latest display, Stanford put together a gymkhana-style course that was designed to test the system’s ability to not kill cones or bite hay bale walls. This might seem like a bit of showing off, but the goal is really to assist future autonomous driving systems in avoiding bad situations and helping programs deal with inclement weather. Which means for a large slice of the driving public, that a DeLorean is more capable than they are.
