Audi steals the spotlight at the Berlin Film Festival

Daniel Bruhl, the man who we from the motorsport-loving industry famously know has “the dude who plays Niki Lauda in Rush”, shined bright at the Berlin Film Festival during his arrival. But not for the usual fashion sense or anything that is standard affair on the Red Carpet but for his choice of transport instead.

Looks like autonomous driving is really not far from the future now that Audi has proven that their driverless cars actually work. Not only did the Audi A8 L successfully pick up the actor and his girlfriend from their hotel in Berlin and executed the drive through the city directly to the Berlinale Palast, the car had even executed a smooth approach along with a progressive, modulated braking to a stop at the kerbside to drop its passengers off in a regal manner.

The A8 L had travelled suitably smooth and in a stately fashion by registering prominent architectural features along the driving route, comparing this logging with precise mapping and synchronising the information with data from its own calculation of its movements.

It had taken Audi years of testing their piloted driving system to come to this point, the first tests were conducted in 2009 in the USA, a year after that an Audi TT S was sent to take on Pikes Peak in the Rocky Mountains without a driver. Public road tests happened in Nevada in 2013 along with the introduction of piloted parking as well.

Was it 2014? It felt like just yesterday that Audi sent an RS 7 Sportback to lap at race pace on the Grand Prix circuit in Hockenheim to demonstrate how dynamic piloted driving can be. The company even introduced automatic emergency evasive manoeuvres in a piloted test vehicle with moving obstacles in the urban environment during their tests in 2015.

The future that the movie I, Robot depicted is near, while the current fleet of piloted cars don’t defy gravity like the Audi that Will Smith had in the movie, we are still very close to that fully automated drive that car provides. If you want that gravity defying car, we still have about 20 years to go before the car in the movie comes to live!

Jerrica Leong