The clue to making future cars feel more alive and in touch with the road may lie in understanding what makes old racecars perform the way they do. A team of researchers and engineers from Stanford took a vintage Porsche to the racetrack outfitted with sensors on both the car and driver to measure how they react. What they learn could make future cars feel better. It might also make Stanford’s autonomous, self-driving car capable of performing even closer to its theoretical limits.
Stanford started well. The team borrowed a 1960 Porsche 356B Carrera Abarth GTL racer from the collection of businessman, artist and philanthropist Miles Collier. (James Dean drove an earlier Porsche 356, including on his last and fatal drive.) The 356 is a seminal design in Porsche racing history. To that, they attached an array of sensors and data recorders on the suspension, throttle, brakes, and steering wheel. A GPS receiver and gyroscope track the car’s progress on the track with inch-by-inch accuracy, as well as measure body roll and acceleration / deceleration.
Then they went and outfitted the drivers with sensors, too, measuring sweat, core body temperature (we’re not asking where that sensor’s located), and blood volume — and future testing will include brain activity, too. These biological responses are then plotted against the data from the car. All this is being done at the historic Mazda Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey, California, during vintage races. (If academics don’t get rich from teaching, there are compensations such as this).
Drive an old racecar or a vintage performance car and you find two things: The controls and sometimes even the handling seem crude. Yet the car seems alive and in touch with the road. Good drivers can actually sense and react to the changing road surface through the feel transmitted from the tires and suspension to the body and steering wheel. The lack of sound insulation in older cars gives a better sense of the environment, too: gravel, rain or leaves under the wheels, for instance, or noises from the car body when it’s pushed in corners. That’s part of what Stanford wants to capture with all that test data.
Giving new cars that sense of oneness with the road is important. Mechanically assisted power steering, common for generations, took away some road feel, then it got better. Now it’s electric power steering that’s being blasted. When BMW switched from mechanical to electrically assisted power steering in the redesign of the BMW 5 Series (pictured right) a year ago, Car and Driver wrote, “The steering in the [BMW] 550i is by far its greatest downfall. The electrically assisted system is linear, but it feels artificially heavy and is devoid of feedback … the lack of feedback leaves one guessing the precise amount of input needed to control the vehicle.”
Stanford’s goals are multiple: improve the feel of future cars, improve their safety, and also help Stanford’s autonomous driving car do even better driving itself. Stanford and Carnegie-Mellon have been at the forefront of research into cars that drive themselves. Stanford’s current autononous driving car is an Audi TTS, called Shelley. Artificial intelligence computers in the trunk connect to the car’s existing controls (including an electronic throttle and electronic power steering).
“What we’re interested in here is understanding: How do the calculations of our autonomous car compare to very skilled drivers,” says Chris Gerdes, program director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford. “Do skilled drivers have an advantage because of their ability to adapt to conditions? Or does the autonomous vehicle have an advantage because of the ability to reproduce things exactly every time and have a much more precise understanding of where it is on the track at any given moment?”
The Stanford researchers, in the interests of science, will do a wash, rinse and repeat data-collection cycle on some of Collier’s other vintage cars (he has 100) to gather more data, and then do the same with modern vehicles. The data will be archived at the Stanford library.
Professor Cliff Nass, who directs the new interdisciplinary Revs Program at Stanford, says, “Eventually we will have a corpus, a set of every single car and driver, to be able to answer the question, ‘How do cars and drivers interact in the most compelling ways?’”
Read more at Stanford University, about the Porsche 356, or watch the video below :
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