Visilab Driverless Electric Van Completes Trek

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Somebody somewhere had better be popping some champagne right now, and frankly, I don’t care what time of day it is because this news is entirely too good to not celebrate. The Visilab project, an electric van that operated without a driver, has completed its trek from Italy to China, a distance of right around 8000 miles.

It left Italy back on July 20th, and managed to show up in China just in time for the Shanghai World Expo, braving such obstacles as rain, snow, and even a brief jaunt through the Gobi Desert. It even went so far as to pick up some hitchhikers outside of Moscow and give them a lift in the process.

The van itself, meanwhile, operated with the help of fully a dozen different refined sensors, such as cameras, a carbon dioxide sensor, GPS and an off-road laser scanner. Humans did ride in the van, and only had to intervene in rare occasions, such as at border crossings or similar checkpoints, and only some fast talking from the on-board humans managed to prevent the Visilab project from drawing a traffic ticket at one point, which would have made it the first driverless vehicle to ever receive a traffic ticket (normally, it’s human beings that receive traffic tickets, not the vehicles that they drive).

Of course, the fact that it took somewhere around 100 days to go 8000 miles means that it had about an average speed of somewhere in the neighborhood of three miles an hour, assuming it never stopped. And this doesn’t exactly bode well for the concept of getting in your car, punching a few buttons to have it drive you to the movies and then taking a nap en route any time soon.

However, the possibilities are now there–the fact that this thing managed to go 800 miles in any length of time sans driver is proof enough of that–and now it only remains to refine the concept and bring it to the consumer.