From the London Times 7/14/06
FORMULA ONE teams tired of paying up to £20 million a year for star
drivers could soon be offered a cheaper alternative that never has
tantrums or demands a wage rise: the car that drives itself. Volkswagen
has been demonstrating a racing car that needs no driver, navigating its
own way by means of laser scanners and military-specification global
positioning systems.
It doesn’t crash, doesn’t get tired and completes every lap at the same
ultimate speed for hour after hour. And it doesn’t shout at the
mechanics, get lazy or bored or demand the use of a private plane to get
to the circuit.
In the cynical motor racing world where critics often accuse the
engineers of doing all the hard work on behalf of the driver, Volkswagen
really has cut out the middle man. The German company races through its
Audi brand, this year extending a string of wins at the Le Mans 24-hour
race. But where each car at the legendary French circuit needed three
drivers to complete the day-night event — risking life and limb as they
tired through lack of sleep — the driver-less car would have set off at
the start and arrived at the chequered flag exactly as predicted by the
engineers who set up its computer brain.
Allan McNish, one of Audi’s successful Le Mans team and former Toyota
driver in Formula One, said: “It’s all a bit worrying. I’ve got to be
honest and tell you that I’m going to be having a wee word with some of
the Volkswagen bosses about this.”
Volkswagen says the ultimate car is two years away but the Volkswagen
Golf Gti adapted as a test bed, pounding around a secret test circuit at
up to 160mph, was using technology that could be put into any racing
car, including the 22 machines contesting the Formula One World
Championship, whether it was Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari or the Renault
of Fernando Alonso.
The cockpit was an eerie place to be, with an exclusive group of
passengers chosen to witness the new technology simply strapped in and
instructed not to touch anything. As the car screeched around the test
track, the throttle and brake pedals popped up and down as though
propelled by ghostly feet; outside the car functioned just as a racing
car would, with screaming tyres and bumping over kerbs, completing lap
after perfect lap. A Volkswagen spokesman said: “Once we have modified
and perfected the system, it could be fitted to any vehicle, whether
it’s the slowest or the fastest car in the world.
“In theory at least, if a car is capable of, say, 500mph but a driver
isn’t committed or talented enough to handle such a machine at such a
speed, our new technology could. And, subject to the laws of physics and
technical failures, it cannot come off the road.”
The only downfall of the experimental system is that it is not
programmed to deal with the unexpected — such as the priest who wandered
on to the Silverstone track at the British Grand Prix in 2003. Drivers
can make snap decisions in those perilous moments and also adjust their
lines on the track to avoid oil spills or compensate for track changes.
The bonuses, according to Dr Markus Lienkamp, the project leader, are
that drivers do not need to be paid and the driver-less car never
crashes. “We can avoid the costly and damaging mistakes that costly
drivers inevitably make,” he said. “We’ll leave it to your imagination
to determine what this could mean for the future of motor sport.”
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