Where Stanford invents self-driving cars
Take a tour of the automotive lab where professors, students, and industry partners come together to build projects like Stanley the self-driving SUV and the Pikes Peak Audi.
I got a cool tour of Stanford University's automotive research lab last week. This is the multidisciplinary gathering place where professors, students, and automotive industry partners come together to build projects like Stanley, the self-driving SUV, and more recently the Pikes Peak Audi, which earlier this month managed the drive up the 12.5-mile Pikes Peak mountain road with no driver -- just a good GPS system and a carful of road sensors and computers.
The genesis of this little tour was the Reporters' Roundtable podcast from October where we talked about the ways automation is increasingly affecting automobilization. One of the biggest problems, it seems, is going to be the messy interface between the cars' brains and human drivers. Or is that passengers? What do you call a driver when he or she is responsible for the car they're in but not actively controlling it?
Click through for the slideshow.
