First Coast-to-Coast Automated Drive

The first coast-to-coast automated drive is officially in the books.

An automated car successfully completed the first transcontinental drive from San Francisco to New York. Nearly 3,400 miles were covered with 99 percent of the drive in fully automated mode. Throughout the nine-day trip that crossed 15 states and the District of Columbia; the vehicle encountered its fair share of complex driving situations. Including traffic circles, construction zones, a variety of weather conditions, and, perhaps most frighteningly, other drivers.

The drive was used by Delphi engineers to research and collect information that will help further advance active safety technology; the most rapidly growing technology sector of the auto industry. The team collected nearly three terabytes of data, about 30% of all of the printed material in the Library of Congress, or a hell of a lot of selfies; FYI. 

“Our vehicle performed remarkably well during this drive, exceeding our expectations,” said Jeff Owens, Delphi chief technology officer. “The knowledge obtained from this trip will help optimize our existing active safety products and accelerate our future product development, which will allow us to deliver unsurpassed automotive grade technologies to our customers.”

Delphi is a company that delivers innovation for the real world with technologies that make cars and trucks smarter and safer as well as more powerful and efficient. Delphi's automated driving vehicle is equipped with a full suite of advanced technologies and features, many of which are already on the market today including collision mitigation, integrated radar and camera systems, forward collision and lane departure warnings...and you can tell that they're finally confident with the automated driving technology because the test car is more expensive.

In an interesting comment, 'Tim the Realist' said, “100 autodrive cars on the road for 1 year would get 100 years of driving experience which is more than any human currently has. 1 million autodrive cars on the road for 1 year would collect so much experience it would far exceed almost all human drivers. This experience could then be downloaded into all cars, and every new car on the road would immediately start with this level of driving expertise.”

There is a vast potential for automated driving, and it is only in recent years that such a potential has been realized and sought after. I can't wait until they have prototype automated driving systems that can calculate drift, wet surface tension, and collision avoidance as appose to the programmed automatic stop. I mean it's only a matter of time now until automated driving can beat even our best professional drivers.