Autonomous driving technology promises to revolutionize how we get place to place, but thankfully most people won’t be traveling in Siemens’ 1965 Ford Mustang.
As noticed by Jalopnik, the fully-autonomous model had a less than stellar showing at the Goodwood Festival of Speed as the technology looked more like a drunk driver than a glorious glimpse into the future.
The footage starts approximately 24 minutes into the Festival’s live coverage and it shows the model having a petty smooth start. This continues for several seconds, before the car jerks to the left for no apparent reason.
As the car slowly continues along the course, it swerves back and forth a handful of times and occasionally attempts to drive itself off the road. The tedious journey continues to be full of problems as we can see the safety driver intervene multiple times.
Unfortunately, the safety driver wasn’t quick enough to prevent the Mustang from crashing into some hay bales. This was only a minor accident, but it’s not the kind of thing autonomous driving technology needs in the wake of Uber’s fatal crash.
There’s no word on what caused the issues, but the commentary notes the car’s autonomous driving system relies on GPS signals instead of cameras and LiDAR sensors. This could help to explain the erratic behavior as a drop in GPS reception would effectively render the model blind. Interestingly, Roborace – which is bringing its autonomous Robocar to Goodwood – noted the course represents a unique challenge as there is spotty GPS reception in area.
While the footage probably isn’t the marketing triumph that Siemens was looking for, the car was jointly developed with Cranfield University’s Advanced Vehicle Engineering Center.