Traveling nearly 3,400 miles and generating three terabytes of data, Delphi Automotive has completed the longest automated drive across North America to date.
Delphi Labs, the Mountain View research base for U.K.-based Delphi Automotive, put its self-driving car technology to the test in a 2015 Audi SQ5, and completed the ride from San Francisco to New York in nine days. Google Inc. and Tesla Motors have made headlines with their self-driving features, but Delphi is the first to accomplish a cross-country road trip. The car was self-driven for 99 % of the trip, the company said.
“This is a giant proof in the pudding type moment,” said Thilo Koslowski, vice president and automotive practice leader with tech research firm Gartner. “I have been in this car, and it is impressive what Delphi accomplished. It also confirms something I have been saying for a while: Self-driving cars are closer to becoming real than people realize.”
Engineers drove the car for about 50 miles of the trip,in cases such as on-and-off ramps and construction zone where lanes were not marked or only sporadically marked. Once, the team had to take control of the wheel to make an aggressive lane change to get around a cop car on the shoulder.
Delphi engineers collected information that will help further advance active safety technology during the drive that crossed 15 states and Washington, D.C. The collected data is equivalent to 30 % of all of the printed material in the Library of Congress.
During the trip, the vehicle encountered complex driving situations such as traffic circles, construction zones, bridges, tunnels, aggressive drivers and various weather conditions. – Silicon Valley Business Journal