Volkswagen after Google showed cars with autopilot

Not only Google successfully develops unmanned vehicles and asks to change the legislation so that they are allowed to drive on common roads along with ordinary cars. Other companies work in the same field, including Volkswagen.

At the HAVEit conference, the German concern demonstrated the Temporary Auto Pilot technology (temporary autopilot, PDF ) based on the two-liter Volkswagen Passat turbodiesel.

By analogy with airplanes, a car driver can activate this function on easy sections of the road to release the steering wheel and get some rest. Volkswagen's temporary autopilot works when driving on highways at speeds up to 120 km / h. The main advantage of the system is that it is almost ready for introduction into production cars.
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In reality, the development of Volkswagen does not constitute anything particularly revolutionary, but is a refinement of several already existing technologies, which have long been equipped with production cars. This is an adaptive cruise control and lane tracking system, which are combined into a single complex.



The autopilot is able to keep its lane and maintain a stable distance behind the vehicle in front, to brake if necessary. The system is also able to recognize road signs and change the speed accordingly.

In addition to highways, Volkswagen autopilot can drive in traffic jams, repeating a start-stop cycle of the same type, maintaining distance and lane.

In this case, we are not talking about a completely autonomous and universal system. Maneuvers are extremely limited and such a car will never be able to travel from point A to point B without driver's help, as Google cars do. This is just a temporary solution: the autopilot only works under the supervision of a driver who can take control at any time. However, even such a system is another step towards fully autonomous cars, which are likely to spread in the future.

So far, the unmanned car market remains the undisputed leader of Google. Their cars have already rolled in test mode for more than 225,000 km on California roads, including on the main highway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. 1600 km passed completely automatically, that is, an employee of Google was in the passenger seat. Now in Google's fleet of six unmanned vehicles models Toyota Prius and Audi TT.