Here in Las Vegas at CES, Audi has showcased continued work on its self-driving ‘piloted drive’ efforts — currently housed in a stylish A7 concept car. While brains of the ‘zFAS’ system need the power to continually monitor surroundings and plan or control trajectory, Audi’s engineers have shrunk the components down to the size of an iPad. The future is coming. Take a look…
Also: Audi’s Quattro Laserlight Concept Car Is A Gorgeous Powerhouse
This is Audi’s fourth year at CES. When the company demonstrated its piloted parking and driving last year, the boot of the car was filled with cables and electronics. A year later, you can see the improved scale of the central driving system below — integrated into the car.
Nvidia President and CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, also took the stage to explain that its tech is being used in Audi’s zFAS piloted driving system, digital instrument cluster and infotainment consoles. The chip now being used: The Tegra K1 with 192 cores.
Speaking of infotainment, Audi also previewed a few details on its future interface concepts built on the legacy of its rotary push button with touchpad (A8/A6/A3). The new S3 Sedan will add handwriting and voice recognition thanks to Google.
Beyond this, Audi is working on a ‘virtual cockpit’ interface for its sporty TT two-door that’s customised for each driver, changes information based on driving task, and optimises speech recognition. In the shot below you can see how a screen shows up directly in your dash, in this case, focused almost entirely on Google Maps.
So, some cool details for the future, but not too much new info about Audi’s driverless system, beyond the fact it’s now definitely more compact and further along in development.
A good thing for Audi, considering the a race with manufacturers like BMW, Toyota and Volvo to introduce driverless tech focused initially on taking over when you’re in traffic or while parking.