Volkswagen to let self-driving e-Golf cars drive on test track in Hamburg

Car manufacturer Volkswagen is going to test eleven self-driving copies of its electric e-Golf car on a circuit built by the municipality in Hamburg. The test road is open to any manufacturer and the German manufacturer will be the first to use it.

These are cars that can drive autonomously at ‘level 4’, but there will be a driver in them. The test will initially be on a three-kilometer stretch of road, but the entire track will be nine kilometers, with 37 traffic lights and a bridge connected via 802.11p, the Wi-Fi variant for communication between cars and infrastructure at 5.9GHz. can communicate. That communication will work from next year, says Hamburg.

The e-Golf copies have fourteen cameras, seven radars and eleven laser scanners on board to map the environment. Volkswagen claims that the equivalent of the computing power of fifteen laptops is present in the trunk to process the 5GB of data per minute. In addition, the manufacturer emphasizes that it observes all privacy laws in the test.

With the test, Volkswagen eventually wants to launch ‘products for the automated transport of goods and people’ on the market in a few years’ time.