Gadgetory

well comfort convenience safety all characteristics you might reasonably associate with the concept of self-driving cars unless you're in a BMW self-driving cars yes that is in that case you're looking at adjectives like crazy insane nerve-racking we went out to Las Vegas Motor Speedway a few miles from our home base here in Sin City to check out a new research project at BMW where company engineers push self-driving cars to their hairy limits the official company line is that it's all done in the name of safety but in reality is the most terrifying fun you can have at the hands of a fully automated robotic car I had the chance to ride one of them and it's a seriously surreal experience the driver or more accurately the passenger sitting in the driver's seat presses a couple buttons before the car simply takes over and blast through a twisty track with no regard for the ham sandwich still sitting in your stomach dicing on the cake came on lap to where BMW had intentionally wet the track to induce a prolonged oversteer the car handled it perfectly staring through the slippery turn better than most humans did and recovering without skipping a beat in other words the car wasn't really self-driving it was self drifting but as I mentioned before BMW says this madness is all in the name of safety how can we control a car in a very critical situations at the border of the driving dynamics when the car starts to drift how can we pull it back on the road and how can we how can we manage the critical situation as a very important part of setting up a complete system for real autonomous driving OneTouch access to automated high-speed joyrides might not ever make it to production but BMW says that the research it runs here will help to get you a fully automated car by 2020 with many variations of partial automation long before that in fact many of the technology is linked to self-driving like dynamic cruise control lane detection have been in production cars for several years now still I pay extra for this way extra