Car makers and technology companies are both dreaming of a future where self-driving cars are normal, you’ve got companies like Google working on such projects whereas conventional car makers are also in the game. The Daimler group, best known through its Mercedes-Benz brand, previously showed off its self-driving big rig truck but now it has tested one out on an actual public road, Autobahn 8 in Germany to be precise.
This was the first ever public road test conducted by Daimler of its semi-autonomous Highway Pilot system inside a truck that’s currently in product so it wasn’t a concept truck or anything, the company was really trying to see how the technology works in a truck that it’s already making.
There was a crew in the vehicle to take control should things go wrong but that didn’t happen, instead the big rig truck was able to steer itself down the highway by using data from a plethora of onboard systems like cameras, radars and even normal features like adaptive cruise control.
Daimler did need to seek special permission for this test, it still might be a while before we start seeing big rig trucks driving on their own, but the test goes to show that self-driving technology works just as well on big rigs as it does on small cars like the one Google has built.