Turn Your Conventional Car Into a Driverless One for 10 Grand - CityLab
Founder Kyle Vogt seemingly has the chops to compete in the competitive driverless space. We learn from a great February profile in Inc that Vogt studied electrical engineering at MIT (shocker) and that he took part in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge (alongside so many other big names in the driverless field, including Google’s Chris... When he was 13, he built a 200-pound BattleBot for the bygone robot-combat competition--which became a Comedy Central show--and road-tripped with his dad to enter two BattleBot events. At the moment, the RP-1 system can only be installed on “any 2012 or newer Audi A4 or S4,” and it’s restricted only to daytime highway driving in California—though in time the company surely hopes to expand to other cars and city roads. As with all driverless cars, the timeline is also unclear. Cruise’s website says the first (sold out) wave of RP-1 preorders is scheduled to ship in 2015, but California has yet to release its regulations for the public operation of autonomous vehicles, so for now the only RP-1 cars allowed on the road... And drivers would still need to abide local laws: that means no texting behind the wheel even while your Audi does all the work. Obviously it’s too early to take a city perspective on a car that can’t actually drive in cities. But the RP-1 does raise the big question on the minds of driverless experts: Will people own these cars or. Source: www.citylab.com
