Category: Accessories & Tech

You may remember news from November last year about a driverless Audi TTS being prepared to conquer Pikes Peak. Stamford University are providing the technology required to achieve this goal and they recently ran an article on their online newsletter giving some further background on the car they’ve named ‘Shelley’.

Even better than that, there is also a YouTube clip of the car being put through its paces (available after the jump). The Stanford team have even taken the car to the Bonneville Salt Flats and “driven” the car at speeds in excess of 200km/h.

Not content with merely driving Miss Daisy to the summit, the Stanford crew want Shelley to tackle the hill climb at race pace. Chris Gerdes, leader of the graduate research team says, “Our goal is to show that we can do this.

“There are some sheer drops at Pikes Peak in which any sort of self-preservation kicks in and you slow down a bit. We want to go up at the speed that few normal drivers would ever think of attempting.”

Nice! Shelley’s attempted run up Pikes Peak is scheduled for September.

[Source: Stanford University News]

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.