I'd like to introduce you to Bobby.
Now, Bobby is an autonomous Audi RS7 and that means he can drive himself.
We've come to the Ascari racing circuit here in Spain to see if autonomous Bobby can go
round the track faster than I can when I'm driving a normal RS7.
Hopefully he can't because, if he can, it's going to be a little bit embarrassing for
me.
Just like a normal RS7, Bobby has a 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 with 560 horsepower.
However, he is also fitted with radars, cameras, specialist GPS to sense where he is on the
track, with a small computer in his boot decides how to steer, brake and accelerate to follow
the racing line at the optimum speed.
Clever technology, but surely not as clever as human.
To find out, I went out first in a normal RS7 to see how fast I could lap Ascari.
The time for Bobby to beat is two minutes, 12.5 seconds.
So, could he do it?
I was about to go for the most unusual passenger ride of my life.
So Klaus, the car is driving driving itself, we're coming to first chicane here and you're
not going to do anything.
I don't know why I'm putting my hands up!
So I should point out that Klaus is here for mainly legal reasons because, if something
was to go wrong, we need a human to be there to be in charge of the vehicle.
He's doing absolutely nothing.
As you can see he's not using his hands on the wheel at all and I can assure you his
feet aren't touching the pedals either.
They're not, are they Klaus?
This is a very surreal experience.
So, what I'm going to do to prove that Klaus isn't doing anything, I'm going to hand him
my camera phone and he's going to take a selfie of us as we go down this straight.
So we're going to go down here maybe around 100mph down this straight and we're doing
a selfie.
I'm going to post this to my Facebook page, there we go, and if you just dab that button
there we can post it.
So that's now uploaded to my Facebook which Klaus did while we're going round a track
at quite a lot of speed and if you go to my Facebook page you should be able to see my
selfie there.
This is most unusual, Klaus.
Not for you, it's your day job to do this - normally I'm doing the driving.
We're trusting Bobby.
He's got very good lines actually.
See how he takes this apex.
It's those really tight corners that are the most impressive - can he nail this apex?
Yeah - well done Bobby, smashed it.
That's awesome that bit where it's slowing down and you can feel the car squirming and
it's controlling it.
And there we go, that was our lap wasn't it?
So you are in full control of Bobby now, aren't you?
It's driving like a normal car.
I think you'll probably agree with me, that was quite impressive.
In the end Bobby logged a lap time of 2 minute, 14.6 seconds, so not quite as quick as me.
But not far off.
I can't say I've ever experienced that before.
Well Klaus that was really interesting with the car driving itself like that, but it's
quite an impressive thing the way it even counter steers if it wants to - quite surprised
how capable it is out there.
Hopefully it's not going to be as fast as…That's a little bit odd, has it ever done that before?
It's never done this before.
It appears that Bobby's gone off for a lap on its own, obviously wants to have a bit
more fun.
That's a bit strange.
Audi says the technology in Bobby will be available in road cars by the end of the decade,
but don't worry, it doesn't want to create driverless taxis like Google does.
The idea will be to put the car in autonomous mode for the boring bits of the journey like
driving on the motorway or finding a parking space, but the human will be able to take
over when they want to have some fun.
Sounds like a good idea to me.