As we drove to watch the electric car rally

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    Some time ago, in Italy (more precisely, at the University of Parma) a project was launched to develop autonomous electric vehicles-robots. The goal of the project is to create a car that can charge from a conventional wall outlet and drive on general roads completely autonomously (without drivers). Recently, the first prototypes were created and an automobile race Italy-Hungary-Ukraine-Russia-Kazakhstan-China was organized (maybe some other countries were missed). The idea of ​​the rally - testing of prototypes plus the popularization of electric vehicles plus work to improve autopilot. In principle, you could already hear about this project, because wherever you just wrote about it. But it was all a theory. But it’s interesting to always see with your own eyes. And here a small column of prototypes of such cars the other day passed by my city. Sin was not to look!


    Our plan, in principle, was simple - there is “Live Tracking” on the project’s website , theoretically it can be used to find out the coordinates of cars at any time and “catch them” when driving nearby. In practice, it turned out that the coordinates change about once an hour and, given the average speed of these electric vehicles (40 km \ hour), we had to guess their position and eventually chase after them 30 kilometers. (Special thanks to the person who made the page with the coordinates weighing 1.5 MB, which made it impossible to open it from a mobile phone in the “tower in the devil-where” communication mode).

    The observations were as follows:


    1. The convoy consists of 2 electric vehicles and 4 (or 5) escort vehicles responsible for recharging, repair, communication, etc. The differences in quantity were caused by the fact that one of the cars was separate from the convoy and was conducting, as it seemed to us, video recording. Or maybe it seemed to us.
    2. Cars look exactly the same as on the project site . The exact same bunch of cameras, sensors, lasers, etc. On the sides.
    3. Drivers of both cars were drivers, although some announcements claimed that the cars drive by themselves. The driver of the first car held his hands on the steering wheel. It is not very clear whether he drove a car or just in case he insured the autopilot. The driver of the second car ostentatiously held a camera in his hands, adjusted external sensors, waved his hands at us, etc., trying in every possible way to show that the car was driving itself, "without hands." This is explained by the fact that the first machine “paves the way” - based on GPS, cameras, lasers, radars and other things, builds a route that can be manually adjusted by the driver. And the second machine, in addition to all of the above, also receives the track of the first and monitors it.
    4. People are friendly, smiled at us, waved, took off a little speed to let us take a picture and shoot a video. True, they did not stop. But it is understandable - they have a schedule.
    5. On escort vehicles, a large Gazprom logo hangs. At first, Gazprom was a little surprised by Italian electric cars, but then we came to the conclusion that these are mobile diesel generators for recharging in the field. Pruflinka, however, no. Maybe just a sponsor.
    6. Cars move in a sinusoid from the edge of the track to the dividing line and vice versa. The sine wave is almost a constant period. It’s a little strange to see such a trajectory - a human driver would try to stay straight.
    7. In electric vehicles there are cameras that broadcast live video from time to timein Internet. Not always, they save traffic (which they honestly admit), but you can look at the track. Behind the camera sits a man who, when passing by a Cossack or a Muscovite, zooms in on the camera and, in Italian, admires the flight of Russian automobile scientific thought.
    8. Do not make noise. Well, or almost no noise.
    9. I really wanted to see how electric cars will pass traffic lights, junctions, turns, etc. but to the nearest such facilities there was 70 km of road, and we just ran out of gas and free time.
    10. We learned a popular sign: if you stand on the track in a blue shirt with a video camera in your hands, you can see many, many cars braking sharply in front of you. :)

    Tonight cars came to Kiev. The site writes that they drove on autopilot even a little around the city. Tomorrow, August 5th, in Kiev they have a mega-event. You can come see this miracle live. Journalists even ride.

    Project site
    A couple of our photos

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