

Germany plans highway test track for self-driving cars - kargo
http://blog.a9t9.com/2015/01/germany-plans-self-driving-cars-test-track.html

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ccozan
I am driving A96 everyday to work. It's a waisted hour.

I would like to do the following:

\- tell the car to drive to work

\- actually autonomously drive on the HW, while I work ( I have 5Gb included
on my LTE VF abo so I can do all my work remotely)

\- keep all the speed limits ( I am personally driving like crazy, in order to
minimize the driving time )

\- drop me on the curbside

\- go find a parking place :)

After work: \- calling my car to pick me up

\- drive home, autonomously, while I slack on the internet or sleep

\- wake me up when entering the garage.

at this moment I can hire with 450 euro a month a chauffeur that does all
that. But I would buy in a second a car with such a possibility.

EDIT: formatting

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peterjancelis
Would you still want to own your personal car when cars can do all that?

I think what you describe is the future but we'll be renting luxury vehicles
from Uber (or equivalent) for very little money.

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andrewtbham
Summary: Germany is opening up A9 Autobahn for testing self driving cars.
Previously, German companies couldn't test on the public roads due to
regulations. German car companies don't want to depend on Google for
autonomous driving technology.

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sokoloff
In 1991, I worked for Daimler (Mercedes) in their Advanced Vehicle Research
group. We had an abandoned section of Autobahn a few miles outside Stuttgart
available for our use, but we also had authorization to test on public
highways in autonomous mode. We just had to have a driver seated and paying
attention, and had a red panic button on the center console. Pushing the panic
button reverted the vehicle control to fully manual. (This was in a large bus-
like vehicle, based on the Vario platform, a little larger than a current
Sprinter.)

[http://www.autoevolution.com/news/a-short-history-of-
mercede...](http://www.autoevolution.com/news/a-short-history-of-mercedes-
benz-autonomous-driving-technology-68148.html#agal_4) is an image of the
actual vehicle I worked on.

So, while we couldn't test in no-humans onboard mode, we logged hundred of
miles in fully autonomous mode.

Technical notes: the programming language was Occam. I'd have to look through
my notes to see what the network size was, but the vision system alone (my
main focus, no pun intended) was in the low double figures of processors, with
most of those being dedicated to variance calculations to find prominent
horizontal edges. I seem to recall we processed the video stream at 15 frames
per second by the time I left.

Best. Internship. Ever...

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saosebastiao
A test _highway_? I thought the highway was the solved problem. Google's car
handles the highways so well that they don't even bother testing it on the
highways anymore.

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adevine
Still, if the highway were _only_ autonomous networked vehicles, you could do
some other cool things, like allow faster speeds and more throughput because
the cars could be spaced closer together.

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kaybe
I suspect they will rather limit the speed for autonomous vehicles since
there's no limit, but above 130 km/h you will be partly guilty for accidents
even if it wasn't your fault. (So it's a legal issue.)

The A9 is a very interesting choice because it links Munich to Berlin and
probably has a lot of business travellers. If they could work while driving,
it could be a big selling point.

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gambiting
That's already the case with regular cars. There is no limit so in theory you
could drive at 250km/h and it's perfectly legal(I've done it in the middle of
the night, it's very cool if the conditions allow it), but if you get into an
accident at anything above 130km/h you might be held liable for not driving at
an appropriate speed.

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huuu
Since this week the Dutch national road traffic agency (RDW) is allowed to
grant exemptions to companies that want to do tests with self driving cars and
trucks on Dutch roads.

So the Netherlands is also going for self driving cars.

I won't be surprised if our grandkids will laugh at us when we tell them we
drove cars ourselves ;)

