Photo spies catch automotive premieres in the city streets quite often thus messing up the companies’ plans for inconspicuous tests. Well, the University of Michigan is going to help breaking off this habit by building a closed test facility comparable to the size of Vatican City.
It is going to be not just practice ground, but an entire city with simulated infrastructure — road intersections, traffic lights, railroad crossings, buildings, pedestrians, and four-lane highways.
“We will actually be writing code for the test facility. We'll be able to trigger tricky traffic signal timings, or a pedestrian stepping into the intersection at just the wrong time, for example”, said Edwin Olson, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering, in a statement on the official site of the University.
This facility will open this autumn and the first test car honoured to have a ride in the “city” streets is the Ford Fusion hybrid sedan. Most probably, car manufacturers will have to wait in huge queues to get a chance to test their new cars there, but on the other hand, there will be less traffic jams in the cities unless some carmakers want to test the traffic jam mode.
