It was once the party trick of film star Herbie the Volkswagen Beetle, but the German huge has revealed that customers will be able to purchase cars that can drive and park themselves for real within the next five years.
Called “automated driving” and “automated parking”, the two systems will allow chauffeurs to de-stress behind the wheel while also decreasing the number of accidents, improving fuel consumption and lowering CO2 emissions.
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Engineers at Volkswagen’s electronic research laboratory (ERL), based in the heart of Silicon Valley in northern California, are currently testing a raft of technology that will soon appear in Volkswagen group models best across the range – from a base model Golf best up to the next-generation Audi A8 likely to appear in 2016.
The ERL already has an outstanding history when it concerns autonomous technology – its engineers, working with Stanford University, pioneered the well-known VW Touareg DARPA Grand challenge car (below) and a similar VW Passat Estate – both were fully autonomous. much more recently the laboratory was the brain behind the Audi RS7 that lapped the Hockenheim race track fully autonomously with no driver.
The VW group of America’s head of chauffeur support systems, Jorg Schlinkheider, told car Express: “Automated driving helps us to achieve our goals of decreasing safety, improving comfort levels and decreasing tension levels, and helping the environment (keeping cars driving much more smoothly will improve fuel economy and decrease CO2 emissions).