Britain might stop in its tracks when snow starts falling, but Ford’s driverless cars won’t.
Ford has released a video that shows its driverless car successfully navigating in the snow.
Driving under heavy snowfall can be treacherous at the best of times, so it’s amazing to see an autonomous vehicle manage the feat.
Check out the video below:
“Driving in snow can be a slippery challenge, with the potential for one blizzardy gust to white-out your field of view,” says Ford.
“So if self-driving cars are to become a reality – and they almost certainly will – they must be able to navigate snow-covered roads.”
Related: Apple Car news
Ford’s autonomous vehicles use a technology called Lidar, which is a surveying system that measures distance by illuminating targets with laser light.
It’s the same technology that’s used by the HTC Vive VR headset to perform positional tracking in a room.
One of the consequences of Lidar on a driverless vehicle is that a huge amount of data is generated.
Ford says that autonomous cars collect and process more data in a single hour than the average person uses in smartphone data over ten years.
Earlier this year, Ford told TrustedReviews it hoped to have consumer-ready driverless cars on the roads by 2020.
(apester:569795558089e8dd05d295f8)
Are you sold on the idea of driverless cars? Let us know in the comments.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.