Germany Plans Highway Test Track For Self-Driving Cars

An anonymous reader writes with news about a new project to test autonomous vehicles in Germany. "The German government wants to convert part of the A9 Autobahn in Bavaria into a test-field for advanced car technology. The project is key to ensuring the country's 'digital sovereignty,' according to its transport minister. The track, part of the 'Digitales Testfeld Autobahn' project, would be launched this year, Alexander Dobrindt said on Monday in an interview (in German) with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. The plan involves equipping the road with infrastructure to allow cars to communicate with each other and the road's own sensors to provide necessary data on traffic. 'Cars with assisted driving and later fully-automated cars will be able to drive there,' Dobrindt said. Germany, a major European car producer, wants to have robotic car technology that's not dependent on foreign companies, the minister said. Domestic producers 'won't rely on Google' he stressed."

Comments

Still sounds like early flight...

[Firethorn]

I'm still reminded of what I've read about the Wright Brother's attempts at powered flight, up against dozens of other teams, some with national support.

I look forward to seeing them, because with efforts taking place in Germany, Japan, and the USA to just name the 'big 3', somebody is probably going to succeed in fairly short order(still years though).

Car accidents cost us enough to more than pay for it.

Re:Still sounds like early flight...

[TWX]

Inevitably someone will invent new Bott's dots that install like the old ones that can be sighted by the lane tracking system, and contain directional flow, speed, lane number, and other information that can be passively interrogated by RFID, and when they need to be changed, they can be scraped up like existing ones are. Might not be good for urban city streets, but should be good for highways and freeways, and combined with object detection and tracking and a computer's ability to predict speed and direction changes of other cars and of objects, there shouldn't be much of a need for more than that.

I think it's a mistake for cars to communicate with each other. I don't trust programmers to write bug-free and exploit-free software to run on those cars, and I don't want someone's car lying about its speed or other characteristics such that it may cause me to crash.

Lack Of Faith

[JimSadler]

Since VW can't even create power windows that are reliable I have little hope for Germany creating a good self driving car.