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| English: Audi A7 Deutsch: Audi A7 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Self-driving cars have proved a hit at this year's CES and Audi has been one of the manufacturers showing off the next gen tech.
Audi's autonomous A7 successfully negotiated a multi-story car park
and managed to park itself, all without a human touching the wheel.
The A7 doesn't have the same sensors and cameras strapped to it that Toyotya's Lexus AASRV has but instead relies on a laser grid map of the car park relayed to it over Wi-Fi from sensors placed around the structure.
This does mean that in order to make like Knight Rider, you'll need
to be in a place that has already been fitted with these sensors.
According to Audi, we're still a decade or so away from this being an
everyday feature. But the idea of pulling up to the car park and letting
the car find a spot itself while you head off to the shops has its
appeal.
Unsurprisngly the Audi A7 doesn't bolt around the multi-story like the opening of Driver but instead keeps things to a sedate five miles per hour.
“At Audi you’d be hard pushed to find an innovation that isn’t
related to electronics nowadays,” said Ricky Hudi, head of Audi
electrics/electronics development.
“These enable us to implement full networking. A defining feature of
the last decade was that we integrated all the functions in the car.
This decade will see us network the car seamlessly with the environment,
under the Audi connect banner – with the driver, the Internet, the
infrastructure, and with other vehicles.”
All sounds very promising in our opinion. And while a car that parks
itself is an exciting prospect, we're waiting for the one that'll safely
deliver us home from the pub after a few too many.
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