It seems that, when it comes to autonomous transportation, Audi is making sure race tracks aren’t going to ve a problem for your amazingly intelligent self-driving car.
The RS7 piloted driving concept has conquered the FAST Parcmotor circuit near Barcelona, where the German automaker once again demonstrated its technological prowess in autonomous driving. Since there wasn’t a need for a driver, in the car there was a couple of international journalists, who got the chance to see just how much of a racer this car really is.
A few months back, the RS7 was present at a race course in Sonoma, California, where it managed to lap the 4.2 km (2.6 mile) circuit in 2:07.67, though that wasn’t its most impressive accomplishment.
In October 2014, an autonomous RS7 named “Bobby” went around the Hockenheimring at speeds of up to 240 km/h (149 mph), which is almost as cool as the fact that Audi made sure that a newer car, codename “Robby”, was to be around 400 kg (881 lbs) lighter than that previous model.
Robby is powered by a biturbo 4.0-liter V8 producing 560 PS, which until recently was as powerful as any other RS7 you could find – except now there’s the ‘performance’ version with 605 PS.
Another impressive demonstration took place earlier this year when “Jack” (an Audi A7 piloted driving concept car) drove 900 km (559 miles) autonomously from Silicon Valley to Las Vegas, again with journalists on board. All these experiments are vital because they yield valuable knowledge for series-production systems – ranging from sensor tech and data processing to vehicle control and stabilization.
According to Audi, piloted driving will make its production debut on the next-gen A8 luxury saloon, where the systems will help the car assume driving tasks during parking, in stop-and-go traffic and on freeways at speeds up to 60 km/h (37.3 mph).
PHOTO GALLERY
