Across the country in a self-driving car

[NOISE] Hi, I'm Wayne Cunningham with CNet, and I'm standing here with John Absmeier, the director of the Delphi Labs in Mountain View, California. And the car behind us is about to go on a very extraordinary journey. John, can you tell us a little bit about where it's going? Absolutely. So this is the first and longest trip across the United States. it's going coast to coast from San Francisco to New York. We're going to set off on March 22, Sunday. That's about 3,500 miles and our intention is to arrive in New York in time for the New York Auto Show. That's, that's a long route. Are you gonna mainly be on freeways? You're gonna have to stop in cities at some point aren't you? So, we, we are gonna have to stop, but the purpose of this drive is to collect data about highways across the country. So, we're really taking this chance to test our automated highway pilot, and collect a lot of information to improve the technology. We've spent the last year or so testing here in California, as well as in Nevada. And so we have a ton of information about urban driving. In fact, you got a chance to see it, I think, at CES this year in January. But this trip, the purpose is really all about automated highway. But you will be driving automated in the city? No, we will not. We can, of course, if we have. High, high-fidelity map information of those cities. But in this case, we're really focused on the highway. Okay, so a driver will take over when you get to inner, when you have to stop overnight. Correct. It's on-ramp, on-ramp to off-ramp highway pilot. Run us through the sensors on the car. You've got radar, you mentioned, and lidar. Yeah, so there's roughly 20 sensors on the car. It has radar, which are high-volume, mass-production sensors. Those sensors are on all four corners, plus front and rear. Mm-hm. There's also. Forward vision systems. And vision systems are used for things like traffic sign recognition, pedestrian detection, as well as traffic light recognition and lane marking detection. It also has Lydars around the car which are a third sensor for redundancy but also for higher fidelity information like in urban driving. And then it has high accuracy GPS. As well as, vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure communications. Okay, and the, then its got a brain that obviously processes all that information. What we have is we call a multi-domain controller. And it's sort of like the brain of the vehicle. It's pulling all the information together, fusing the data, and then making complex decisions about how to make the car move down the road. And as it's driving are you worried about getting traffic tickets, or speeding tickets or anything like that?>>We don't anticipate that this car is going to be hands free 100% of the way across, across America. In fact we're hoping to learn what those corner cases are and what areas of the country. there could be differences where we need to develop the system further. Do all the states you're gonna go through permit, autonomous driving? Awesome question. So actually five states regulate it, or actually five places. Right? Washington DC, California, Nevada, Florida and Michigan. There's regulations in place that require documentation and training programs etcetera. The rest of the, of the US does not have regulation. And, and what that means is that self driving or automated driving is not precluded, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's legal. We've reached out to all the states that we're gonna be passing through. We've notified them, and in some cases gotten feedback. Just reminding us that we have to follow the laws. What's the next step? What's the drive after this? Yeah, not really sure yet, but, but we'll see. Hopefully then next step is, is really being able to bring these to mass production. All right. So bring these systems and software solutions into the mass market. Alright, well thanks John. Appreciate it. Thanks, Wayne. Alright, Wayne Cunningham I'm with cnet here with John Absmeier looking at the autonomous car that's gonna go from San Francisco to New York. [NOISE]