Does the advent of autonomous driving and increased focus on fuel efficiency signal the end of driving excitement for you? Porsche doesn’t think so, according to Car and Driver, as it is testing a new InnoDrive adaptive cruise control that not only saves fuel, but surprisingly is said to up the fun factor as well.
Like other autonomous systems currently in development, InnoDrive measures parameters such as road conditions, positions of other vehicles and posted speed limits; the difference here is that it also takes into account road gradients and turn radii, stored in the navigation system’s database. This means the car can quite literally see the road ahead in three dimensions.
Here’s where it gets interesting – in the right setting, the system will drive as quickly as possible and in the most fuel efficient way. Analysing the corner ahead, the car will avoid decelerating as much as possible, pulling as much as 0.70 g through the bend (a more sedate mode has a 0.50 g limit).
It will even accelerate under full throttle in the engine’s most frugal rev range, and will brake or coast when entering cities or other speed-restricted areas to perfectly match the speed limit. It sounds a bit like riding a really fast, really terrifying roller coaster, except you still have to steer the thing.
Currently under development on the winding two-lane roads outside Weissach (where Porsche’s research base is located), InnoDrive is claimed to be able to reduce fuel consumption by as much as 10%, all the while shortening travel times by up to 2%. Suddenly the future does’t seem so soul-suckingly boring now, does it?
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As fast as it can…?
Like a roller coaster? With a flat six soundtrack?
Where do I sign?
I think carmakers should just roll out the autonomous cars AND do crowd-sourcing of road,environment data collection. Kind of like Waze, but much more than traffic.
It would probably speed up the maturity of this technology.
But therein lies the question of managing massive amount of data and making sense out of it.
Small change makes real difference. Way to go!