According to a recent survey conducted by the American Automobile Association, most Americans are not exactly “cool” with self-driving technology.
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Despite services like Google’s (GOOGL) Waymo operating on the streets of American cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco and Elon Musk pushing Tesla further into an autonomous future, 61% of American motorists are afraid to ride in a self-driving vehicle.
Additionally, just 13% of motorists say that they trust autonomous, self-driving technology.
If self-driving cars scare you or leave you skeptical because of the reported dangers they put human drivers and pedestrians under, researchers are pushing limits beyond your comfort zone.
Recently, a clever team of researchers modified a Maserati MC20 to drive itself and used it to break the autonomous land speed record at 197.7 mph.
The record-breaking test took place on the runway at the Kennedy Space Center. With a length of 2.8 miles long, the NASA facility’s runway, once used to handle Space Shuttle landings, provided more than enough space for the driverless Italian sports car to reach its absolute limits.
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What does an autonomous Maserati do for me?
The team behind the record-breaking run insists that they aren’t just sending expensive Maserati sports cars at top speed down a runway for the heck of it.
The AI driver software was developed by the PoliMOVE-MSU team; a special team focused on AI-driven autonomous driving software at the Politecnico di Milano in Italy.
Paul Mitchell, CEO of Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC), the organization behind the project, explains that these speed trials push their driving software to its absolute limits, which could help make them safer at normal speeds.
In essence, if self-driving software cannot handle high-pressure milliseconds-level decisions at break-neck speeds, it won’t be able to handle hostile city streets and traffic jams.
“These world speed records are much more than just a showcase of future technology; we are pushing AI-driver software and robotics hardware to the absolute edge,” said Mitchell. “Doing so with a streetcar is helping transition the learnings of autonomous racing to enable safe, secure, sustainable, high-speed autonomous mobility on highways.”
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Highway driving seems simpler than city driving for both A.I. self-driving software and actual human drivers. However, speed changes everything. At 25 mph, such software is tasked with split-second decisions that could end in an incident. At nearly 200 mph, its senses are heightened, as it is tracked with precision driving under conditions where the littlest twitch could cause a wreck.
“The AIDA team used this test to push the boundaries of autonomous driving, improving safety and reliability,” Politecnico di Milano Electronics, Information, and Bioengineering Department Director Prof. Sergio Matteo Savaresi, said in a statement.
“Conducted in controlled environments without a human driver, the test assesses the AI’s stability, robustness, and reaction time, ultimately enhancing safety for low-speed urban mobility situations.”
This latest record dethrones a previous 192.8 mph mark set by IAC and the previous speed record held by a similar AI-driven Maserati MC20.
Stellantis-owned (STLA) Maserati’s $239,000 MC20 is powered by a 3-liter twin-turbo V6 that makes 621 horsepower. According to Maserati, the MC20 has a top speed of 202 miles per hour with a living, breathing human driver behind the wheel.
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