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Stanford’s Self-Driving DeLorean Drifts, Does Killer Donuts
With inspiration from rally car drivers, Chris Gerdes’ team have designed MARTY, an autonomous, drifting, electric DeLorean. “We think automated vehicles should be able to execute any maneuver within the physical limits of the vehicle to get out of harm’s way,” says Chris Gerdes. MARTY can do “fairly perfect” drifts in circles, says Jon Goh, mechanical engineering graduate student who led the project. The long term goal of the project is to build an autonomous car that can handle many different driving scenarios even if that means drifting to avoid an obstacle or recover from a skid.
