Race of self-driving cars - level 3
A steering wheel steering itself! Pretty clever, eh? Well, a two-day driverless car contest kicked off this morning in Changshu in east China's Jiangsu Province.
Up to 22 self-driving cars from 14 universities and research institutions are competing with each other. The competition’s called Future Challenge 2014.
There’re two categories – the expressways and suburban roads and the urban roads.
In the first-day race, these cars will cover 15 kilometers around a local lake. They have to make a 90-degree turn, one of the biggest challenges in the race. The performance is graded according to what you might want to call the “four esses” – safety, smartness, smoothness and speed.
This year’s contest is the sixth of its kind.
Difficult words: steering wheel (a wheel that a driver rotates), steer (rotate/move), kick off (start), suburban (of an outlying district of a city), grade (measure).