VW: “Drivers NOT Wanted”
Posted By RichC on July 7, 2006
As a boy, the first movie I ever saw was “The Love Bug” at the Skyline drive-in theater in the back seat of my dad’s Chevrolet Corvair. (actually I think it was it “Born Free” not that it matters.) In an article sent to me by a VW TDI driving friend, German engineers at Volkswagen are coming closer to bringing a “Herbie,” or at least a close relative, to life.
🙂
The current test car is a fully automatic Volkswagen Golf GTi ’53 plus 1′ (its codename) and is capable of driving itself at speeds up to 150 mph. The vehicle can maneuver around corners and even tightly placed cones through a marked test track. It can do this without help from any human assistance using electronic ‘eyes’ of radar and laser sensors sending the information back to its computer.
The Golf GTI uses GPS navigation to track it exact position which has been enhance to locate it to the inch. According to the article, “it drove itself faster and more precisely than the VW engineers could manage.”
I’d like to see this technology go into the DARPA Challenge?
EDIT 7/7/2006 10:40AM – A reader emailed me after reading today’s post that he spotted a FoxNews news break flash about this and sent me an email “knowing I like to include video.” (he’s right) Thanks Jim for reading and emailing to let me know about this. So not to let him down, I found the clip and have included it here.
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