A 1965 Mustang is sitting in a queue waiting to go up Goodwood hill. So far, so normal. As a passenger in said ‘Stang, it’s incredibly noisy thanks to its 289 CI V8, a 4.7-litre with 200hp and 282lb ft of torque, a sound synonymous with prancing horses at the time. So far, so normal.
Behind the wheel is a driver – of sorts. This is where things get unusual. He’s not a famous race driver ready to push the ‘Stang to its limits. Instead, he’s Dr James Brighton, head of advanced engineering at Cranfield University.
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Why? Well, this isn’t your typical sports car. It’s a self-driving one.
Now it’s fair to say that autonomous cars don’t excite most people in the way most cars going up the hill do. (Such as the McLaren 600LT that we tried the other day.) But, the fact that the Duke of Richmond is making space for autonomous cars to run for the first time this year is marked. And, in many ways, a learned route, such as the Goodwill hill route, is perfect for self-driving cars to improve.
So what about this specific car? Well, it’s been developed by Cranfield University and Siemens and makes history this week as the first car to complete an autonomous hillclimb at Goodwood.
It uses advanced location scanning technology to develop an accurate three-dimensional scan of the track, alongside a plethora of sensors, algorithms, robots and control systems.
As it slowly edges forward in the queue, I try to forget the video that went viral two days earlier: that of this very car driving (gently) into a hay bale before correcting itself. I ask what happened. Brighton tells me that a hydraulic hose burst on the steering system, one of the many woes of putting an autonomous system into a classic car. They were up to 1am on Thursday night fixing it ‘with spanners”, he tells me.
Next to Brighton in the car is Kim Blackburn, a lecturer at Cranfield University who has two screens which are displaying an awful lot of data. He explains GPS and an IMU – an inertial measurement unit which takes up half the boot – are the two things working together to map the route, and therefore, drive the car.
As we get off the startline – sensibly at the very back of a run – it’s quickly clear that Brighton is driving the car, rather than the car driving itself. Blackburn is saying ‘no… no… no’ as he closely watches the screens, so that Brighton knows the data is not accurate enough to drive the car autonomously.
As we come out the corner after the Gurney Pavilion and into the straight, the system finds its feet, and soon the car is swerving purposefully to show us what the self-drive set-up is capable of. It’s reassuring to see it can work, but soon enough, Brighton has his hands back on the wheel, taking control.
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