Audi 8- Packed With Clever Speech And Driver- Assisted Technology

Like Knight Rider’s famous autonomous car, Audi’s A8 is packed with clever speech and driver-assisted technology.

- Low Ka Wei

In an era when cost efficiencies often dictate how corporations are run, this is certainly an alluring proposition for the CEO keenly watching the quarterly profits: a chauffeur-driven company car that potentially does away with the expense of an actual chauffeur.

I am referring to the A8. Audi touts its flagship limousine as the world’s first vehicle in production developed for “conditionally automated driving at level 3”. Once this rather jargonistic phrase has been dissected, the significant breakthrough can be quite easily understood.

Under the right circumstances – which, in this case, means any highway divided by a physical barrier between the two directions of travel – the car can drive itself at the press of a button. Using artificial intelligence to handle the menial tasks of accelerating and braking (even from and to a stop) and steering within its lane, this virtual Jeeves will take charge at speeds up to 60kmh.

At this point, clued-in readers would rush to point out that systems today can already do this. Like Cadillac’s Super Cruise, Tesla’s Autopilot and the “traffic jam assist” adopted by many carmakers. But the vital difference in the Audi is that you can take a literal hands-off(and eyes-off) approach. Unlike existing level 2 automation, this step-up requires you to take over the wheel only when the system prompts you to. The feature is called “traffic jam pilot” – in Audi-speak, the suffixes “pilot” and “assist” denote level 3 and level 2 automation respectively.