Driverless Car Completes Mission

The car, which started its mission only 9 days ago, has gone 3,400 miles.

Driving in Manhattan isn’t something that the best drivers in the world would want to do, with the criss-crossing paths, crazy cab drivers, and thousands of pedestrians. That’s exactly why the ending point for the first ever driverless car was Manhattan: there was no one to say no. Automaker Delphi started the car’s route at the Golden Gate Bridge and ended it in New York City to see how the car would fare in multiple terrains, according to a story on CNN. 

While no one was driving that car, by law, there had to be a human being inside of the car while it was in motion, just in case technology would fail. There were also engineers watching the car throughout the journey, collecting data on everything from average speed to fuel efficiency. More than 99% of the trip was done on automated technology. 

The driverless car is an Audi SQ5, and was completely tricked out in the technology that it could pull from when determining best practices: satellite radar, fast acting microprocessors, and software that allowed it make human-like decisions for safety, exiting traffic, merging, navigating streets, and parking.

The company has said that they don’t plan to make any more cars like this, but that they want to sell the technology to other automakers. This is the first test of the car that had it driving for longer than just a few minutes and on different types of roads in the same test.