OSCHERSLEBEN, Germany — Two Audi RS7 performance sedans raced around a track in northern Germany. The car without a driver won this matchup by five seconds.
In its effort to bring autonomous-driving technology to the streets, Volkswagen’s Audi is testing unmanned vehicles at speeds as fast as 190 mph. In these experiments, the car decides for itself the best way to take the corners in its race against human drivers.
The map the car gets “just contains the left and right boundaries of the track,” Peter Bergmiller, an Audi technician, said Tuesday during a test with a vehicle named Bobby on a track here about 120 miles west of Berlin. “The car starts to think about it and generates its optimal line.”
Automakers from Mercedes-Benz to Tesla Motors are developing systems to ease the strain of driving by letting cars park themselves and even take over the wheel in stop-and-go traffic. By showing that computers are able to push cars to their limits on race tracks, Audi is aiming to convince regulators that the technology can be safe in the real world.
If authorities open the door to self-driving features, “the first systems for piloted driving could come to market in a few years,” Audi development chief Ulrich Hackenberg said in a presentation of the brand’s autonomous-driving technology.
There’s a lot at stake in getting cars equipped with these features on the road. Technology for self-driving cars is forecast to become an $87 billion market by 2030, according to Boston-based Lux Research.
Both Mercedes and Audi got approval last month to test self-driving vehicles on California roads, to get their German-engineered cars used to U.S.-specific situations including eight-lane highways and traffic lights on the far side of an intersection.
