Autonomous driving - over 30 years ago!
08/23/2017
Is it coming or not, the self-driving car? Yet it is much older than most people think. Cars were already driving autonomously over 30 years ago. In the fall of 1986, the magazine Auto Motor und Sportpublished an article entitled "Future World", which examined the day-to-day research of the major German car manufacturers. It dealt with the question of how we would be driving in the year 2000.
At any rate, at Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, three VW Golfs could be seen driving independently with a minimum distance between them. And one driver was seen leaving the steering to the computer (picture above) while reading the newspaper himself. It's worth noting that the computing power of a modern cell phone was equivalent to a computer system the size of a living room. And so, of course, all this autonomous driving only worked on closed-off and known roads.
Car-to-car communication was also already being considered, except that the signals were to be transmitted via induction loops in the roads (e.g. LISA), and "Prometheus" also aimed in this direction. Improved environmental protection and the careful use of energy were mentioned as objectives. Safety was also mentioned in passing; after all, the writers already realized at the time that an autonomously driving car would of course consistently adhere to speed regulations ...
