Delphi’s Self-Driving Audi SQ5 Completes Cross-Country Road Trip

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Remember the autonomous Audi SQ5 that Delphi sent off on a cross-country road trip last month? Well, the crossover finally arrived at its final destination in New York, setting the record for the longest automated drive in North America.

The SQ5 covered nearly 3400 miles in the coast-to-coast road trip, with 99 percent of the drive in fully automated mode. The SQ5 started the trip at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and over the course of nine days, it crossed 15 states before making it to its final destination in New York. This road trip proved to be the ultimate test for the SQ5 since it was challenged with a variety of driving conditions. Delphi says the SQ5 performed well in traffic circles, construction zones, bridges, tunnels, and a variety of weather conditions. It even performed well when coming across aggressive drivers.

"Our vehicle performed remarkably well during this drive, exceeding our expectations," said Jeff Owens, Delphi chief technology officer in a release. "The knowledge obtained from this trip will help optimize our existing active safety products and accelerate our future product development, which will allow us to deliver unsurpassed automotive grade technologies to our customers."

Delphi engineers arranged the record-setting road trip so that they could gather critical information that will help in further advancing the company's active safety technology. After all was said and done, they collected nearly three terabytes of data, which Delphi claims is equivalent to about 30 percent of all printed material in the Library of Congress.

Although it may be a long time before fully automated cars become the norm, drivers are already benefitting from the advanced technologies and features that make up an autonomous car such as blind spot monitoring and collision mitigation.

Source: Delphi

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