CES is taking place at the moment in Las Vegas, and some of the most amazing and innovative technology is on display there.
One piece of it is making its way there, however, and doing so all by itself, as Audi have created a self-driving car that is going to cover a distance of over 550 miles to travel from California to Las Vegas, and it pretty much confirms that we live in the future.
The concept is called "piloted driving", and allows the car to drive autonomously on highways, but isn't quite ready for navigating the streets of a city just yet. The car will have someone behind the wheel for the trip that will take about two days, but they won't be required to do all that much by the sounds of it.
Using a number of sensors, lasers and a 3D camera (everything that you could imagine that sounds futuristic, essentially) the car will be able to drive at speeds of up to 110 km/h without human help, and "can initiate lane changes and passing manoeuvres as well as accelerate and brake independently", according to Audi.
"The results of the test drive underscores our piloted driving competency" said Prof. Dr. Ulrich Hackenberg, Audi Board Member for Technical Development, and with the company set to make a pretty big deal of this at their CES showing this week, we can probably expect plenty more self-driving cars in the near future.
While the tech hasn't yet evolved to a point where they can navigate cities, the highway driving seems to be pretty well developed, and will alert the driver to retake control of the car when they are approaching the exit to get in amongst the city traffic again. If the driver doesn't take over again, then the car will put on the hazards and pull over when safe to do so.
Main pic via Audi/The Verge
