An Audi TTS is being modified to tackle one of the world’s most daunting roads, the 9390ft Pikes Peak Hill Climb. nothing so newsworthy about that until you realise this car does not have a driver behind the wheel. The car currently has a whole bunch of driverless gizmos stuffed in the boot, but the propeller heads from Stanford University preparing the car plan to use real time Java algorithms to replace the driver. Live telemetry updates can be transmitted to and from the car as far as 30km away.
Dr Burkhard Huhnke, executive director of the Electronics Research Laboratory, Stanford University, said, “We believe that developing a car that can perform as well and respond as rapidly as a ‘professional’ driver, like a race or rally driver, will eventually be able to drive its way around incidents in a way that a ‘normal’ driver couldn’t.
“While a less experienced driver may freeze or make the wrong ‘correction’, the Autonomous TTS would be able to take over or guide the driver to escape from a critical situation. It could also compensate if a driver is inattentive to conditions or distracted but of course, it won’t prevent all accidents.”
While we must take Dr Huhnke’s words at face value, one doesn’t have to stretch their imagination too far to see how this technology, coupled with GPS-linked speed limiters, could make driving, well, a thing of the past.
Such an outcome would mean that classic films like Climb dance could be all we have to show our grand children to explain what fun driving used to be.
