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Delphi thrilled with results from autonomous car's cross-country trip

In the first trip across the United States ever made by an autonomous car, engineers from Delphi Automotive were surprised to learn that, in some cases, their vehicle behaved a lot like a human driver. "The car was scared of tractor trailers," said Jeff Owens, the company's chief technology officer. "The car edged to the left just a little bit when it would pass trucks, and that was an interesting observation." Engineers made hundreds of notes throughout the drive, as the autonomous car covered 3,400 miles through 15 states en route to a showcase near the New York Auto Show. Overall, company officials said the car performed better than anticipated in a variety of road and weather conditions. In the course of the cross-country drive, drivers actually controlled the car only for about 50 miles, and those cases were limited to on-and-off ramps and the occasional construction zone where lanes were not marked or only sporadically marked. The purpose of the trip was to glean information on how the autonomous car worked in a real-world environment. Google and others have tested autonomous cars and autonomous features in select real-world environments before, but Delphi's adventure was the first to trek into a test with such varied challenges over a nine-day trip that began near the Golden Gate Bridge on March 22. There are some things the engineers have already learned, like the fact the camera systems had the occasional blip when the sun-angle was low. And there are some things to still be learned, as they pour over three terrabytes worth of data from cameras, radar and lidar sensors in the weeks ahead. "It's going to take us a couple weeks to digest all this," Owens said. "But we had all the data from tests. It was time to put this on the road." Built into an Audi SQ5, the vehicle was striking, if only for the fact it looked like a normal car. Many other autonomous vehicles have quirky sensors atop the roof or other features that make them stand out as experiments. Delphi arranged this one to look as much like a normal car as possible, right down to stowing an army of computers under cargo mats, so the rear contained as much trunk space as the production model. If a fellow motorist didn't know where to look -- or take the time to notice the person in the driver's seat didn't have their hands on the wheel -- there was no reason to suspect this was anything other than a regular car.

2015 Audi A3 TDI Challenge

I officially gave up after 758 miles. The 15 or so miles leading up to this decision were spent in the right lane of Southern California's I-8 freeway, hazard lights blinking, climbing uphill at just over 40 miles per hour. After two days of sweating to the oldies (okay, a mix of SiriusXM Classic Rewind and First Wave), I had covered those 758 miles in a 2015 Audi A3 TDI on one tank of diesel fuel. And when I say sweating, I mean it quite literally. In order to maximize fuel efficiency, my co-driver and I kept the air conditioning off, even when the direct sunlight in the California desert had outside temperatures hovering around 90 degrees. I had been doing this hypermiling exercise for two days, the car was getting stinky, and I was ready to hear the sweet "thhhhhhhwack" of satisfaction that would finally come from peeling my sweat-soaked self off the A3's leather seat. Sexy, I know.
Audi had challenged me to drive 834 miles from Albuquerque, NM to San Diego, CA, on just one 13.2-gallon tank of diesel fuel. If you believe the EPA's highway fuel economy rating of 43 miles per gallon, this means I should have sputtered to a stop after 568 miles. But I went a grand total of 758 - that's 59.4 mpg - and I could have kept going. In fact, two teams made it the full 834 miles on their one allotted tank of fuel. That's over 63 mpg. That's twenty miles per gallon better than EPA estimates.
The TDI Challenge took me through three states over the course of two days, and the 834-mile journey wasn't just a simple highway cruise. I negotiated uphill climbs, long series of involving switchbacks through the mountains and elevations that ranged from 220 feet below sea level to nearly 8,000 feet above. I learned that super-crazy-efficient driving like this an incredibly challenging game that takes serious skill. But I also learned that if you're going to attempt to stomp all over the EPA's numbers, the Audi A3 TDI is one heck of a car for the journey.

Audi A3 Clubsport Quattro concept bringing its 525 horses to W?rthersee

It's almost late May, and you know what that means: the last of the snow has melted, the Stanley Cup playoffs are in full swing, the flowers are blooming, and the performance-car faithful are descending on Wörthersee in Austria for the annual GTI-Treffen.
Not only is the Wörthersee Tour (as the automaker calls it) a chance for enthusiasts to show off their rides, it's also a prime opportunity for the Volkswagen Group to show some of its most dedicated customers what it can do. Past meets have given us such notables as the Audi A1 Clubsport Quattro, Volkswagen GTI W12-650 and Skoda Fabia RS 2000 Roadster, to name just a few. And now Audi has emerged as the first VW Group brand to reveal what it has in store.
It's called the A3 Clubsport Quattro, and seems to offer a pretty clear indication of what we should expect of the next RS3. The concept is based on the S3 sedan, but swaps out its 2.0-liter turbo four for a retuned version of Audi's sweet 2.5-liter turbocharged inline-five, retuned to produce a massive 525 horsepower and 442 pound-feet of torque.