A top executive at Volkswagen’s new engineering and planning center in Chattanooga said Friday that fully self-driving cars could make the rounds in the Scenic City within a decade.
“We have already drove tens of thousands of miles without any accident, without any problem,” said Dr. Burkhard Huhnke, the center’s new vice president of product innovations.
Huhnke, talking to Miller & Martin lawyers at an in-house event, said the German automaker last year sent a self-driving concept car from Northern California’s Silicon Valley to Las Vegas, a 550-mile drive.
Audi, owned by VW, became one of the first car companies to obtain a new type of permit issued by California for the testing of self-driving cars, and it has demonstrated its so-called piloted driving technology on an expressway in Tampa, Fla.
Huhnke said that 90 percent of accidents in America are due to human error.