This isn’t another cheesy “Back To The Future” reference, as Stanford University actually built a real autonomous electric vehicle based on the famous movie car.
The video shows us an all-electric DeLorean performing a series of flawless donuts around a cone by itself, smoking its rear tires in a way not one DeLorean could ever dream of and the occupants just sitting in there, holding on until the party is over.
Created to examine the physical limits of autonomous driving, this 1981 DMC-12 was thoroughly converted by Chris Gerdes and his students in order to host an electric drivetrain from Renovo Motors (remember them?) and create a high-performance test bed for their research.
Their creation is named Multiple Actuator Research Test bed for Yaw control or MARTY if you prefer, honoring in this way the “Back To The Future” day on October 21, 2015. The team is examining the development of better autonomous driving algorithms, ones that will allow sacrificing a bit of stability in some situations for better avoid-accident maneuvering.
“The very best rally car drivers do this all this time, sacrificing stability so they can use all of the car’s capabilities to avoid obstacles and negotiate tight turns at speed,” said Gerdes. “Current control systems designed to assist a human driver, however, don’t allow this sort of maneuvering. We think that it is important to open up this design space to develop fully automated cars that are as safe as possible.”
I don’t know about you, but if my future car could avoid an accident using nothing else but drifting, I wouldn’t mind. Would you?
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