Autonomous vehicles
First driverless car 50 years ago
The tire manufacturer and automotive supplier Continental put the first driverless car on the test track 50 years ago. The aim at the time was to test the tires and obtain reproducible results.
The public was amazed in September 1968, with over 400 newspapers, magazines and broadcasters reporting: "Driving through the steep bend with a ghost driver" or "The future has already begun" were the headlines in the press at the time. But it was a far cry from autonomous driving as we know it today: "We had no idea that something like this would happen - we didn't even dream of it," said 76-year-old Herbert Ulsamer, a young vehicle construction engineer at Continental at the time.
Four years ago, Google had made the automotive industry nervous with the presentation of its fleet of robot cars. Dozens of companies are now working on technologies for autonomous driving: Car manufacturers, suppliers, start-ups and tech companies such as Apple, Samsung, Alibaba and Uber. Google's sister company Waymo is considered to be particularly advanced.
What is the Contidrom?
The Contidrom in Jeversen is the prototype of all Continental's tire test tracks. When it opened in 1967, the high-speed oval with a length of 2.8 km was initially available; the other tracks, such as the wet handling track and the dry handling track, each 1.8 km and 3.8 km long respectively, were added in further expansion stages of the test facilities. Since 2012, the 'AIBA' hall (for 'Automated Indoor Braking Analyzer') has enabled automated tests regardless of the weather. Since the Contidrom was built, Continental has tested around 1.3 million tires in the Südheide.
What has become of the first driverless tire test vehicle from 1968?
After numerous conversions and thousands of test drives, the Mercedes Benz 250 Automatic was decommissioned in 1974. It continues to do its rounds on the Internet: The video shows an insight:
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