VIDEO: A Robo-BMW That Teaches You The Ropes - "Look Ma! No Hands!"

Remember the car that Top Gear UK featured on its program a couple of years ago? At least I think it was a couple of years...anyway.

BMW has successfully built a driverless car that essentially teaches you the ropes around a given track. The car has driven on Top Gear's circuit, the Hockenheim, the Nurburgring and now Laguna Seca. Where hasn't it been?

Long story short, the car can do just about everything you can; however, it leaves out that whole part of human error. Rumor has it that the robo-BMW can be beat but we find that hard to believe considering it has no soul.

With that said, you better get out your tinfoil hats because what's next? The Terminator?


An excerpt from an AutoWeek report follows:

Race-car drivers, you may soon be out of a job. Just as IBM built a computer that could beat humans at chess and even at Jeopardy, BMW has built a car that can beat your lap time. OK, the best drivers can still beat this car, but we can imagine a time when autonomous cars will handle all of our driving needs, even the competitive kind.

We know this because we just took three high-speed laps of Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca sitting in the driver's seat--but not driving. Our BMW 330 was turning laps of just more than two minutes, and we weren't doing anything but sitting in it. Acceleration, braking and steering were all done by the car's enormous brain. We had our hands positioned near the steering wheel in case the machine's brain suddenly went nuts, but it hasn't yet done that in more than 12,000 miles of testing...