If you, as a company, expect the public to buy off on any sort of new and previously unknown technology, you have to perform a real-world test to prove feasibility, and that is exactly what Audi has done with the RS7 Concept driverless car. At the end of the German DTM race, the unmanned RS7 took a lap of the Hockenheimring in a stable and undramatic fashion, hitting speeds close to 150mph while lapping the track exceptionally well, with the car not so much as making a slip on acceleration or a slide under cornering. At the end the car parked itself perfectly in the pole position.
While we aren’t the ultimate propagators of driverless technology, we have to hand it to Audi to run such a test as a public spectacle like the DTM race, and congratulate them on a flawless execution. Next up: enter the car in the DTM series and let’s see how it does in traffic!
Cool video and feat of engineering. I think the announcer was talking faster than the car was driving though.
How do we know that a human driver didn’t run the course first, and his steering/brake inputs were recorded to be “played back” by the computer? Like the Camaro rock crawling picture (flood victim?) “I want to believe”.
I will be truly impressed when a computer can make a lap faster than a human. And a little bit worried for our future (Skynet decides humans are inferior… on the race track).
I was kind of rooting for a rampage streak, lol.
Pretty cool to see, would of been cooler (or not?) if they had the speed overlaid on the video.
Must of been a Texan programmer, I didn’t see the blinker come on once.
The Knight industries car Kit accomplished this and whole lot more back in the eighties, just ask David Hasselhoff, just saying.
Cool technology, but I still don’t understand the point of a driverless car…
It is suppose to prevent accidents, espically now that half the people on the road are paying more attention to their smart phones than driving. I still don’t like the idea. I saw where a lady had wrecked her brand new car in a dealership parking lot when she was being taught how to use the automated parking feature, her new car drove into another car, so it still has some issues to work out. I don’t want one as driving is one of the things I enjoy in life !