At Stanford, cars of the future
April 26, 2011 | Length: 00:02:36
Solar-powered automobiles, self-driving vehicles, will these be the cars of tomorrow? Sven Beiker heads up Stanford's Automotive Research Center, where students are designing and building their own vehicles. SmartPlanet correspondent Sumi Das visits the lab and takes its cars out for a test drive.
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Transcript
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>> Silicon Valley has long been the epicenter for technology innovation but what about automotive innovation?
>> Here in the Silicon Valley, we have a great automotive environment, actually we have Volkswagen, we have GM, we have BMW, we have Mercedes, we have Honda, we have Toyota. State of the art communication architecture
>> Sven Beiker head of Stanford Center for Automotive Research wants his program to be part of the conversation too.
>> There're actually a lot of challenges out there that students are very excited to address with the research, with their thoughts, with their ideas.
>> From cars that basically run entirely on a single computer.
>> In a regular car, the steering rod has to go through the front end and then it's actually mechanically connected to the wheels, here we're only connected by wires and it's all done through a computer.
>> To autonomous vehicles that don't require a human operator at all. This is Junior?
>> That's right. So Junior is just like any other full size Volkswagen Passat Station wagon except it has a whole bunch of laser range finders. These are devices which shoot out light into the environment, measure how long it takes to hit something and then from that can infer how far away the object is.
>> The research center is also focused on energy efficiency and building the green cars on the future. One example is their solar car project where students learn to build their own concept vehicle.
>> So this car has a battery pack in the front so we have lithium ion batteries just like in your cell phone or your laptop and we have an electric motor attached directly to the wheel right behind me here and of course there are we have about a kilowatt of solar power on top of this car, which is enough to propel the car at about 45 miles an hour on a sunny day without using batteries at all.
>> Every other year the students enter their solar car in the World's Solar Challenge, a racing competition in Australia that puts their school against others from around the world. Beiker hopes students will graduate from his program with advanced knowledge of user interfaces, automotive systems and product development, all important skills students will need when designing the cars of tomorrow.
>> These students have this understanding what an automobile means today and even more so what it might mean in the future.
>> For Smart Planet I'm Sumi Das.
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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====