Gadgetory

this Chris from the verge and today we're looking at a pair of Audi's you're definitely not going to find in your local dealership one dries for you one reads traffic light and both are kind of amazing so ideas worked with the city of Las Vegas to wire up all of these streetlights so that they're actually downloading information about the programs that the streetlights are running on the Reds the greens in real time and Audi is calculating when the lights are likely to change the engine is currently completely off the car has start/stop technology and because it knows when this light is gonna change from red to green when there's five seconds left the engine automatically turns on so we're ready to go normally with a start/stop engine the only time the engine turns on is when you you let your foot off the brake and then there's a little bit of a delay before then it was ready to go with this by the time the light changes you can press the gas and you're good to go and one of the great things about the car being able to detect when it needs to start the engine is that if you're not paying attention the stoplights you're looking around you can feel the engine start you can feel it on the pedal the brake pedal you can sort of hear the engine a little bit so that kind of gives you a reminder that you need to start paying attention to these lights about to change from red to green the system is only live in a few European cities right now and it's very difficult to scale because every major European city does their traffic lights differently it's a little more homogeneous in the US but it's still a huge task to try to take in all of this traffic light information collected in a server farm in Germany and process it and get it out to all the cars so this is a slow process the Las Vegas deployment is dis receipt yes of course but over time hopefully we'll see this later we took through the highway to see what happens when you fall asleep while your self-driving car is slugging along in a traffic jam ok here we go please watch the traffic around me because this is pretty scary there you go so it says driver attention please well just switch you can switch back off again uh uh something's happened that's uh that's a loud beep that is it's hard to ignore it is absolutely we want the driver to know that he's supposed to tinkle right it uses a variety of sensors both inside and outside the car to make this happen inside there are cameras that are actually keeping on my face I fall asleep the car detects that atomically shuts off the piloted driving and if I take too long to take control of the car he'll actually bring it to a full stop put on the flashers and call the cops so there you have it just like last year Audi's throwing a lot of new technology at CES and neither of these technologies are ridiculous notions that won't ever see the light of day they're real and there's good reason to think they'll be in production car seat