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Self-Driving Car Will Make Trip From San Francisco To New York City

Posted by samzenpus on from the bo-hands dept.

An anonymous reader writes with news that Delphi Automotive is undertaking the longest test of a driverless car yet, from the Golden Gate Bridge to midtown Manhattan. "Lots of people decide, at one point or another, to drive across the US. College kids. Beat poets. Truckers. In American folklore, it doesn't get much more romantic than cruising down the highway, learning about life (or, you know, hauling shipping pallets). Now that trip is being taken on by a new kind of driver, one that won't appreciate natural beauty or the (temporary) joy that comes from a gas station chili dog: a robot. On March 22, an autonomous car will set out from the Golden Gate Bridge toward New York for a 3,500-mile drive that, if all goes according to plan, will push robo-cars much closer to reality. Audi's taken its self-driving car from Silicon Valley to Las Vegas, Google's racked up more than 700,000 autonomous miles, and Volvo's preparing to put regular people in its robot-controlled vehicles. But this will be one of the most ambitious tests yet for a technology that promises to change just about everything, and it's being done not by Google or Audi or Nissan, but by a company many people have never heard of: Delphi."

3 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Car is not self driving. by burtosis · · Score: 3, Informative

    Let's call it for what it is - cruise control plus lane following plus automatic braking to prevent running into vehicles in front of them. It does not turn, it does not make smart safety decisions, it cannot handle simple variations in real conditions. It's as close to being an autonomous car as Siri is to being strong AI.

  2. no it won't. by YesIAmAScript · · Score: 3, Informative

    Delphi already said the car will only self-drive portions of the trip. Long portions of the trip, but only some portions nonetheless.

    "When it’s not on the highway, one of the humans inside will take the wheel."

    --
    http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
  3. Re: CMU: Been There, Done That by discontinuity · · Score: 4, Informative

    I just was going to mention the CMU project and someone beat me to it. They drove nearly autonomously from Pittsburgh to San Diego in 1995. Here are some (old) relevant links:

    The CMU project was not anything that was near consumer-ready and it also was not 100% autonomous. IIRC, humans had to intervene in more complicated driving scenarios and the autonomous system handled the open highway stuff. they report a figure of 96% or so autonomy by miles driven on a shorter trip from Pittsburgh to DC. So it's not like they had everything figured out back in 1995. But still...1995!