Audi has selected Thunderhill Raceway Park in northern California, USA, as a key US test center for advanced piloted driving research.
Under the multi-year partnership, engineers from Audi and the Electronics Research Lab in Belmont, California, will use the track to study how self-driving vehicles perform at the limits of speed. In this way, the engineers will understand how to calibrate the vehicle software and advanced driver assistance systems to handle sudden and extreme conditions.
This new partnership provides even greater testing capabilities, however Audi experts will continue to develop piloted driving on surface streets and freeways to ready the initial deployment with the A8 in a few years.
“Thunderhill provides a perfect setting to safely test the wide range of systems that will make highly automated driving a reality in the new future,” said Ewald Goessmann, director of the Electronics Research Lab.
January 13, 2016