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Comment by zitterbewegung | Hacker News Reader

I would really like this on top gear and compare it to the other drivers on their closed course. I wonder how well it would do in their celebrity challenge that they do every episode?

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It's worth noting that Stanford and Audi (an extension of the VW/Stanford work with DARPA) - will be competing in the upcoming Pikes Peak challenge. For those unaware, it's a balls out race up a mountain road. Asphalt, dirt, weather changes, and sheer dropoffs.

So far they've demo'd the car drifting and powersliding into parking spots:

Stanfords Audi (3min): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2UaYIHiiOA

As mentioned above, BMW did just that a while ago (2min): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50rbUfTYykc

Lastly (I can't view the video), Google mentioned a while back they've already put over 50,000 miles on their fleet.

They already did it a few years ago in a self-driving BMW. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRF_KaWzxq4

I don't know if Jeremy Clarkson would let a Prius back on the show...

I believe there are other models involved in the program; not just Prius-es.

Looked up the NYTimes article... it's also installed on an Audi TT.

Why not? He has had them on the show before. There would have to be a reason for it to be on again though. The driverless lap has already been done. The Google Prius would just be slower.

If tuned to a single track it should be completely unbeatable, right?

Not necessarily there might be latency concerns or even other unknown factors that would hinder it. Also what if its wet or other weather concerns? I don't work on the project so I wouldn't know what exactly would be involved.

I do! Oh wait, and then I woke up.

If that were the case, then Shelly, the car racing up Pikes Peak would have been able to beat the human time of 11:21, instead of it's recorded time of 27 minutes.

Sounds like the Watson for cars. It'll happen.

That Prius corners pretty mean ...

Ahh so the all the recalled priuses were actually alpha versions of google's self driving cars. I see.

Ok, I get it there is no place for humor here. Xkcd can do it, I can't. Well I have a great respect for google as a company, that's the company I have always dreamt of working for, and my real feelings about this are that I feel great respect and a tad bit of jealousy for our real life iron men larry and sergey who backed by their enormously successful businesses can work on their world changing toys.

This is unrelated to the parent and I don't know where else to ask...

What is the karma threshold on down-voting?

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