Volkswagen Prepares Temporary Auto Pilot System For New Models [Volkswagen Takes Cruise Control To Whole New Level With An Automatic Drive System Geared Toward Simple Trips]

Posted on TFTS by Steve Anderson on Friday, 24. June 2011 under: Audio,Visual, Cameras & Camcorders, Cars, Transportation Tech

If you’ve ever found yourself bored beyond description with a drive on the freeway, the folks out at Volkswagen are putting something special together for those long trips of mostly straight road. They’re calling it Temporary Auto Pilot, and it represents the first step toward me one day owning a car that will drive places for me.

Volkswagen‘s Temporary Auto Pilot uses a series of sensors, cameras, and lasers to successfully determine how far away other cars are from you, and keep a safe distance from those cars, while also keeping the car between the lines while traveling at up to 80 miles per hour. It will slow down before bends in the road and even negotiate said bends, and the Temporary Auto Pilot can be overridden at any time in case you need to suddenly retake control of the car or make an alternate route due to unexpected conditions on the road. This is geared more towards straight-line driving like highways or back roads, and not so much for city traffic where conditions are constantly shifting.

Personally, I’d love to see something like this get integrated with GPS–it’s not like the car doesn’t already know where I’m going. It’s telling me how to get there, for crying out loud. So if it knows so much about where I’m going, why doesn’t it shut up and take the wheel for me too? Then I could catch up on my reading. Or nap. Still though, this is a fine start, and if we could get it to the point where machines did all the driving for us too, chances are drunk driving incidents would fall through the floor, as well as texting and driving and other such road hazards. Just when it will be released, however, is as yet unknown.

So what do you guys think here? Like the thought of having your car do the driving for you? Or do you think this is the start of some much more insidious, Terminator-style plan to wipe out the human race? Whatever you think, though, we’re always glad to hear from you, so let us know what you think in the comments section.