Lewis Hamilton? Who needs him?

Audi’s autonomous RS7 car laps track faster than many top race drivers

HIGH-performance Audis blasting around racetracks, with nobody at the wheel, is old news. Late last year a speciallyequipped RS7, nicknamed Bobby, lapped the German Hockenheimring at speeds up to 240km/h all by its lonesome.

But now there’s a young-gun on the scene, and Robby, the new autonomous Audi, is lighter, quicker and more advanced than its predecessor.

Performed as a demonstration of Audi’s latest self-driving technologies, Robby the RS7 was set out to lap California’s Sonoma Raceway with no one in the driver’s seat, and according to Thomas Müller, head of driver assistance systems at Audi, it handled the task faultlessly.

“In Sonoma, we took the Audi RS7 piloted driving concept to its physical limits lap after lap, and it handled the task with uniform precision,” he said. “The car turned in lap times that were better than those of sportscar drivers.”

The 412kW super-saloon with all of its special self-driving kit now weighs 400kg less than it did in Bobby guise, and its fastest lap at the 12-turn, 4km circuit was 2:01.01 minutes. All braking, steering and throttle controls were performed fully autonomously.

Another self-driving test car – this one a less speedy A7 called Jack – is also doing the rounds on public roads. Earlier this year Jack drove from California’s Silicon Valley to Las Vegas (an 860km trip) as a demonstration for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and later it cruised some German autobahns at speeds up to 130km/h by itself. Most recently Jack shuttled a group of journalists around the traffic-laden streets of inner Shanghai in China.

Audi’s autonomous tech, which it calls the Piloted Driving Concept, is due to make its production debut in the next generation A8 luxury sedan in 2018.

The system will assume control in stop-and-go traffic at speeds up to 60km/h, and will also park on its own without any input from the driver.