One of the more unusual vehicles that tackled the hillclimb on the first day of the Goodwood Festival of Speed was this self-driving Ford Mustang. But things didn’t go terribly smoothly for the converted classic, which meandered up the hill, required the driver to take over on occasion and even hit a hay bale.
Siemens developed the autonomous version of this 1965 Mustang in collaboration with Cranfield University.
It uses “advanced location scanning technology” from Bentley Systems, with the engineering team having developed a 3D scan of the track to create “connected awareness” (with a little help from GPS) of the car’s own position.
Interestingly (or, should we say, bravely?), the engineers opted to retain the Mustang’s V8 rather than replace it with an electric motor or two.
Watch the video above, uploaded to YouTube by the folks over at Motor1, to see the Mustang’s first leisurely run up the hill at Goodwood. Unfortunately, the unscheduled right turn into a hay bale was not clearly captured in the clip, but you can see it in the image embedded above…