Audi A7 Piloted Drive 2015 review

It's one thing to do it in the lab, it's another to do it on the desert roads of Nevada USA, but how about on the rather more chaotic streets of China's largest population centre, Shanghai?

Shanghai has more people within its bounds than in the whole of Australia, and traffic regulations are treated more as guidelines as this mega-city bustles through its daily activities.

Audi is so far the only company to announce mass production of Piloted Drive systems, and there are plans to begin rolling the street ready version out in Europe and the US from the beginning of 2017.

As part of the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) Asia here in Shanghai journalists were handed a chance to experience the Piloted Drive system first hand within a busy metropolis.  This is the target situation for Piloted Driving, the humdrum of city traffic.

Chinese drivers spend an average of two hours a day in crippling city peak hour traffic. Our test drive was a little way out of the Shanghai CBD, but it was at 4PM, so there was certainly traffic.

There are still many decisions to be made on how the Piloted Drive system will be packaged; our A7 came equipped with two regular radar systems, a single laser based scanner or lidar system and a tricked up mono-scopic camera.

Given the propensity of Chinese drivers to cut in, to assume two cars can fit per lane, to park in a lane out of the blue, and generally make decisions based on volume and time rather than the strict rule of law, it is not overly surprising that Audi engineers are considering a different placement of sensor equipment for the time they roll Piloted Driving out to this, their largest market.

Sitting behind the wheel, our Audi host nudged the A7 into traffic, and drove "conventionally" along the side streets around our hotel. It would have been ambitious to turn on the Piloted Drive system at this point. As the car drove however, it was recording everything in high detail for 50 metres in the forward and side arcs. It was also remembering the past 75 metres of the drive.

Once we reached the on-ramp of a four-lane freeway, we were in Piloted Drive mode. No hands on the wheel, no feet on the pedals and driving in one of the middle lanes at 45km/h behind the car in front, with other vehicles flowing past either side.

The dashboard (virtual cockpit) has completely changed. In the piloted A7 it was once again a prototype, but now the driver had a display showing speed and gearing and little else. In the centre was a graphic representation of the outside activity; as cars flowed past us, so they did on the screen. At one point, as a car cut into our lane, the A7 slowed down moderately.

This is a talking point; this system is far more advanced than the adaptive cruise control we see in cars today. In fact, Audi will not include ACC in cars equipped with Piloted Driving.  On a road system such as Shanghai, being too meek and accommodating will mean no progress; writing the algorithms required some allowance for cut-ins, but not ALL cut-ins. Plus not assuming that a car drifting into our lane is somebody asleep at the wheel is a real challenge for Audi engineers.

Of course there are many other situations one can dream up where decisions need to be made by the AI. Is that a piece of newspaper on the road ahead, or a block of concrete? What about road work stop signs? There are a myriad of situations we all face on a day to day commute.

That is essentially why the speed is capped at 60 km/h at this time; the engineers will work on the decision making of the software before upping the speed capabilities.

In fact as the traffic dissolved around us, and the road ahead became clear, a small alarm sounded; we had ten seconds remaining to grab the wheel (the steering wheel is touch sensitive and immediately disengages Piloted Driving when grasped) to take control or the Piloted Driving system would begin to safely bring the car to a halt.

The idea is that it is unsafe to not begin to speed up under manual control when the road offers a clear drive.  Taking manual control was easy; turning back on Piloted Drive again was simply a matter of pressing the steering-wheel based button.

Audi is still deciding, but the plan is to give access to infotainment systems such as TV Tuners, Facebook, Twitter, long email functionality, Office viewer systems and possibly other options normally only available when stationary.    

Ahead however, on our way to the Bund tourist area of Shanghai, the system detected a curve smaller than the minimum allowed radius.  It was a cloverleaf off-ramp with a tight corner of only 80 metres radius. Piloted Drive can cope with a minimum radius of 100 metres with a warning for anything less than 280 metres.  

It is easy to be excited about the idea of self-drive cars; this experience with Piloted Drive feels and looks like science fiction.  But the reality is that at this point in time this feature has a limited operational arena.

The feeling is lovely and sedate, certainly not disconcerting given the rather tight parameters we were operating in at the time.  The unexpected car cut-in and the approaching curve – with input from GPS – were handled very well by the system.

Certainly in a more traffic-ordered society such as the city roads of Europe this system will come into its own, here in China it remains – today at least – a selection to be made at the (human) driver's discretion.