Hmm. Do NASCAR and Formula 1 rules require a driver? The car is probably faster than the humans - even it was ballasted with an equivalent weight. Walter
I don't know if my post is answering the OP's question, but I was under the impression that Audi was using a concept auto-driving feature similar to Tesla. I am probably wrong, but looked very rudimentary. It seemed to me the car first had to learn the track and Audi had a lot of preprogramming done to help the car around. I guess my point is that it seemd to me that Tesla's auto drive is way ahead of Audi's.
Yeah when Elon spoke of the car parking itself at the 'Unveiling', i too thought of the above ad posted by mnkox...
And if I'm not mistaken, that's from 2012. What's interesting about their implementation there, though, is that it requires the garage to find the car a spot and provide the car a route to that spot. That's not going to cut it. Every parking structure in the country would need to be retrofitted for parking availability, and if the ones that already have it here in Silicon Valley are any indication, they don't work all that well (spots are often noted as open when occupied, as well as the inverse). So we really need autonomous vision and sensor parking, and that's more complicated than it might seem. There's reserved spots, compact car spots the car can't fit in, unmarked up/down navigation to other parking levels, and so forth. The notion of your car endlessly circling the ground level of the garage because it can't figure out how to get upstairs is a real potential issue. This is a much more complex task than it would at first seem.
I am impressed with that video, it seemed that the car was "thinking" where to go, using various sensor tech like tesla. However, I have to wonder how much preprogramming was not shown, as at the beginning of the RS7 video.
Circling the block rather than parking would be interesting feature in NYC. Burn some energy instead of paying for parking . I can see it now. Grid lock caused by cars on autopilot just circling.
I think the thing to realize about this video is that the car is trying to drive like a race car driver would. Race car drivers do not go out there and drive a track at speed without having studied the track or at least driven it slower. Getting ideal lap times is a matter of knowing the track, what lines to follow, how fast to be going where. Just as a race car driver has to study the track, so will an autonomous system. So I think the people saying that the demonstrated Autopilot functionality is much better than this are underestimating the difficulty of this demonstration. I'm sure the Autopilot system could navigate this course (assuming it was marked with lines for it). But it would not get a lap time anywhere near what that Audi did. However, the one thing that both of these demos share in common is that they are both in tightly controlled environments. Audi didn't do the demo with other drivers competing for position and Tesla did not do the demonstration on the a real road. I'll be truly impressed when both are presented in real world situations. All that said I think the driver assistance features Tesla has demonstrated are significantly closer to not being just a demo, if nothing else because the driver is there to takeover for the system in environments it's not able to handle.
Lot of off topic stuff got moved out to snippiness for lack of a better place. See also the existing thread on Autonomous vehicles: Autonomous Vehicles
That's hilarious. I'll bet the cost of electricity doing this would be cheaper than parking fees in NYC!
I still find the sound of a few ICE machines pleasing, but it's the boat anchor in the nose I can no longer tolerate.