Emerging Technologies Blog

I WAS A few hours outside of Los Angeles, tooling down I-5 at the wheel of a sleek Audi A7 on a gorgeous day when a little girl in an SUV smiled and waved. I waved back. With both hands.

This immediately freaked her out, and she started jumping up and down. All I could do was laugh, knowing my vigorous wave was in no way a safety hazard. In fact, I hadn’t touched the steering wheel in more than an hour.

What that little girl didn’t know, despite the stickers on the car, was that I was piloting Audi’s latest autonomous vehicle, a prototype designed specifically to handle the monotony of highway driving. The, er, driving was not nearly so difficult as the preparation—an arduous task that required a day of training in Arizona, a ream of paperwork and a little bureaucratic wrangling that resulted in the great state of California issuing me a license to operate an autonomous vehicle.

And so it was that I found myself riding along in the car of tomorrow on an autonomous road trip from Palo Alto, California to Las Vegas, where Audi is showing off autonomous tech that may be in showrooms by the end of the decade.

 If this A7, nicknamed Jack, wasn’t advertising “Audi piloted driving” on its side, you’d never know it wasn’t just another German sedan cruising down the 5. All the gadgetry that keeps it squarely centered in its lane at precisely the speed you select is discretely incorporated into the car. It’s top-end stuff, too: six radars, three cameras, and two light detection and ranging (LIDAR) units. The computers that allow the car to analyze the road, choose the optimal path and stick to it fit neatly in the trunk. It’s remarkably smooth, maintaining a safe following distance, making smooth lane changes, and politely moving to the left to pass slower vehicles controlled by carbon-based life forms. It’s so sophisticated that I never felt anything unusual, and in fact the car is designed to reassure you that you need only grab the wheel or tap the brake to immediately resume control.


And that’s the most remarkable thing about Audi’s robo-car: All that tech recedes into the background. Driving this car is mundane, almost boring. My interaction with that little girl was the most exciting part of the trip. And Audi couldn’t be happier about that.

A Baby Step into the Future
It should be said straight away that Jack was designed specifically for highway driving, which, by its nature, tends to be largely uneventful. Now, developing autonomous tech that works only on the highway may not seem impressive when you consider Google’s racked up more than 700,000 miles in its autonomous vehicles and has developed a prototype that doesn’t even have a steering wheel. It may even seem like a glorified version of adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning and other semi-autonomous tech you can get on many high-end sedans these days.

The interface for autonomous mode is easy to understand. To hand over control, hit those two buttons on the steering wheel at the same time.

But the autonomous A7 represents one of the biggest steps forward any automaker has taken toward the day when we’re all simply along for the ride. It’s a prototype, yes, but Audi says this technology will be in production cars within three to five years.


Audi, like every major automaker experimenting with autonomous driving tech, sees many hurdles—the technology, yes, but also regulatory issues, insurance questions, and consumer acceptance—that must be cleared before we have cars that drive themselves in all places at all times. So it is nibbling away at the edges, planning to introduce autonomous features one by one. It’s a slower timeline than Google’s “moonshot” approach, but one that gives everyone time to accept the technology.

“We call it a revolution by evolution. We will take it step by step, and add more functionality, add more usefulness to the system,” says Thomas Ruchatz, Audi’s head of driver assistance systems and integrated safety. Full autonomy is “not going to happen just like that,” where from one day to the next “we can travel from our doorstep to our work and we don’t have a steering wheel in the car.”
Audi’s been developing this technology for more than a decade, and has made remarkable progress in the past five years. In 2009, an autonomous TTS hit 130 mph on the Bonneville salt flats and carved the brand’s four-ring logo into the ground. The next year, the same car completed the winding course to the summit of Pikes Peak—a 12.42-mile ribbon of asphalt with 156 turns–in 27 minutes. That’s far slower than Sebastien Loeb’s record-setting pace of 8 minutes and 13.9 seconds, but nevertheless impressive for a car controlled exclusively by silicon and steel. The TTS lapped Thunderhill Raceway Park in 2012, and an autonomous RS7 hit 150 mph on the Hockenheimring F1 track in October.


Racetracks are impressive, but they’re controlled environments. The real test is on the road. Last year, Audi rolled into CES with a car that could park itself and drive itself through stop-and-go traffic. These features, called, appropriately enough, Parking Pilot and Traffic Jam Pilot, should hit the market before long. Highway Pilot, the tech crammed into the A7 that I piloted down I5, is essentially a more sophisticated version of Traffic Jam Pilot and will follow that to market.


Learning Not to Drive 

They don’t let just anyone behind the wheel of an autonomous car. California and Nevada—two of the four states and Washington, D.C., that have adopted regulations governing autonomous vehicles on the road—have reams of rules that must be followed. One of them dictates that anyone who gets behind the wheel must be properly trained.

 For Audi, this means learning to be a better than average driver. The way Audi sees it, anyone given the responsibility of piloting this device on public roads had damned well be up to the task of taking over, because if you need to grab the wheel, the odds are something’s gone terribly amiss. A nicer way of saying this is it takes a lot of skill to be better than Audi’s robot.


I was trained at Volkswagen’s proving grounds outside Chandler, Arizona (VW is Audi’s corporate parent). The day started with a warning that I’d have a better than average chance of experiencing some car sickness, and Audi’s security Was. Not. Kidding about there being absolutely, positively no photography. As if to underscore that point, my phone was locked in a secure box when I arrived and a security guard escorted me everywhere.

 The proving ground resembles Tatooine, minus the landspeeders and banthas, and it sits downwind of a farm with millions of chickens. There’s not a lot to suggest Audi is doing a lot of really cool work here. This is where VW puts its cars through hell, tuning them and adjusting them on a high speed oval, a pair of smaller tracks and an outrageously bumpy stretch of road. There’s even a huge shallow pool and a dirt oval, which would probably be lots of fun in an Audi TTS or VW GTI.


After an orientation session in a dreary office where every sign is posted in English and German (a language in which everything sounds like an admonishment), we headed for the track. VW’s instructors, who have forgotten more than you’ve ever known about driving, led me through a slew of exercises in a GTI that’s been driven hard. I had to drive a slalom, then drive it in reverse. I mastered emergency braking and evasive turning and skid recovery. They even made me hone my parking skills. It was a day-long lesson in fundamentals that everyone ought to master before being issued a license. It also was, for the most part, a blast.

 Once everyone was confident I knew what I was doing, they taught me how to operate the autonomous A7. This took all of five minutes. Basically, you wait until the car’s system determines it’s safe to turn on autopilot (meaning you’re cruising on a highway, and not near an exit or entrance ramp), then you press two steering wheel mounted buttons simultaneously and let go. It couldn’t be easier. That’s by design. Even as Audi engineers were developing the backend tech that lets the car handle itself, a design team was honing the UI based on extensive focus group testing in Europe, China, and the US. “We really want to make sure customers understand it,” says Jurg Schlinkheider, Audi’s head of driver assistance systems.

Alexis Davis Wired.com