Remember all of those autonomous vehicle concepts we saw this year? Yeah, none of them seem as impressive when you learn that Delphi’s customized Audi SQ5 just drove itself all the way from San Francisco to New York City. Thanks to self0driving technology equipped to the vehicle, it was able to make the 3,400 mile cross-country journey with less than 0.1% human intervention.
A self-driving car fabricated by Delphi Automotive, dubbed “Roadrunner,” just completed a nearly 3,400-mile journey across the United States, marking the first coast-to-coast autonomous drive to go down in North America. The Roadrunner, an Audi SQ5 decked out with sensors and other Delphi self-driving systems, spent close to 99% of the nine-day trip in fully automated mode. It navigated through tricky conditions like traffic circles, construction, bridges, inclement weather and aggressive drivers. A Delphi spokeswoman told us a human driver may need to take over in “extremely complex” circumstances like major construction zones for safety reasons, but added, “Our car ran into very few of these situations.” The road trip started in San Francisco and ended in New York City, crossing 15 states along the way. Delphi engineers gathered almost three terabytes of data from the car, information they plan to use in advancing automated driving technologies.