Controlled by Electronics: Continental Launched Its First Driverless Vehicle 50 Years Ago

“We salute the inventive pioneering engineers who developed a driverless car five decades ago. In doing so, they achieved a significant technological milestone in our corporate history, which boasts a wealth of innovations,” said Continental CEO Dr. Elmar Degenhart as he honored the accomplishments of those former Continental employees. “The driverless car of 1968 represents an ongoing common objective at Continental, then a tire manufacturer and now a technology company, which is ensuring safe, clean and intelligent mobility in the future.”

The new systems for the driverless test vehicle were developed for Continental by Siemens, Westinghouse and researchers at the technical universities of Munich and Darmstadt. The vehicle was guided by a wire on the road surface. The electronics system in the car used sensors to detect whether it was still on track and automatically adjusted the steering accordingly. “Ultimately, it was a car that drove by wire,” remarked Hans-Jürgen Meyer (78). Fifty years ago, he was a young engineer responsible for the development of new measurement methods for providing objective tire analyses. This augmented what had previously often been purely subjective tire evaluations. Measurement coils attached to the vehicle detected a magnetic field emitted by the wire attached to the road surface. This system enabled precision electronic control.

“Measurement technology was still in its infancy back then, and we had developed a lot of it ourselves,” explained Herbert Ulsamer (76), who began his career at Continental as a young automotive engineer in 1965 before retiring in 2006. “Research and development (R&D) at Continental was undergoing radical change at the time,” he recalled. Ever stricter requirements applicable to tires as a product called for more thorough research and testing. At the time, more than 1,000 developers were working at Continental on new rubber compounds, tire designs and treads. Today, around 1,300 engineers work at the Stöcken campus alone. They develop new tire models for cars and commercial vehicles as well as for specialist vehicles such as forklift trucks and agricultural machinery. The technology company Continental employs around 44,000 people in research and development.

“For us young engineers, the e-car was like a great big toy,” said Meyer with a smile as he shared vivid memories with former colleagues Ulsamer and Klaus Weber (81) at the anniversary event at the Contidrom. To the three retired engineers, the “e-car” is not a modern electric car but their “electronically controlled car.” “When you went out in the car, you would constantly see and hear the stepper motor working away on the steering wheel, always making a clicking sound,” recalled Meyer. “For employees like us, the car was and everyday thing, but for the visitors from all over the world, it was hugely impressive and fascinating to see a car cruising around without a driver. They saw that Continental was doing something truly extraordinary.”

During their project, the Continental engineers had some memorable experiences working at the forefront of the technology available 50 years ago. “There was a pilot phase, during which test runs with the e-car took place at night as well. The aim was to use it as efficiently and effectively as possible. That meant I would stand at the control station while the car drove through the night. You would see the headlights appearing and disappearing again and again. Sometimes, though, the car wouldn’t come past. This meant that it had lost the wire and had stopped automatically,” said Meyer. Right from the very first driverless vehicle at Continental, development activities were focused on safety in the event of an accident.

“The steel structure in the concrete track probably diverted the magnetic field slightly every now and then,” explained Weber, who worked for the “Electronics” group as a mechanical engineer and electrician in 1968. “As long as it was going in a straight line, everything was fine. But we were particularly interested in lateral aquaplaning – in other words, how the vehicle handled in bends on a wet road. And then often, quick as a flash, the car would lose the wire and come to a halt. There was also a sheet of glass built into the track, and underneath that was a high-speed camera taking 10,000 photographs per second. The goal was to see how the blocks in the tread behaved when the car was in motion. The wire had to be laid in such a way that the tires of the e-car rolled exactly over the sheet of glass. That sometimes worked well, but often didn’t work at all.” At numerous events between 1968 and 1974, the driverless e-car was one of the main attractions for visitors to the Contidrom. Despite all the innovations, the objective of the automated vehicle test for tire development was not yet achievable at that time.

Continental’s goal is seamless, automated mobility without accidents in all variations. To that end, the technology company is currently working on getting highly automated driving ready for production and, at the same time, on the systems necessary to enable fully automated driving on the autobahn by 2025. Highly automated autobahn driving in itself is designed to allow car drivers to temporarily focus their minds on activities other than driving. With fully automated driving, this should be possible for sections of the route without the driver having to act as a fallback mode at all. Continental also believes in autonomous driving. The technology company is testing components and systems for driverless robo-taxis in cities with its Continental Urban Mobility Experience (CUbE) test platform. At the same time, Continental is already pursuing the concept of developing vehicle systems for autonomous vehicle fleets in the distant future. If Continental’s plans come to fruition, the BEE (not only a reference to the insect, but also short for Balanced Economy and Ecology mobility concept) will one day form a swarm of autonomous vehicles of various sizes and configurations, all powered by electricity.

The new driverless tire test vehicle for the test facility in the U.S.A. has been adapted to suit the requirements of the tire test on the basis of the Cruising Chauffeur system developed for highways by Continental. Whereas with the Cruising Chauffeur, development has focused primarily on assisting the driver with automated driving on autobahn routes, the team of developers working on the Uvalde test vehicle is taking things much further. The tire test vehicles are designed to drive autonomously along the test track, which means that there is no longer any need for a test driver to sit in the vehicle while it is put through its paces. The medium-term plan is for multiple autonomous vehicles to cruise around the track at the same time, all monitored from a control center. The main goal is the optimized endurance test on the different test tracks in Uvalde. These days, in scorching heat and extreme environmental conditions, test drivers have to pilot the vehicles hundreds of miles to identify potential weaknesses in new tire designs and rubber compounds. Thanks to automation and the ability to control vehicles down to the very last centimeter, not only should it be easier to compare results, but it should also be possible to optimize the way in which the vehicles drive on the track and thereby to minimize wear on the track itself. In fact, these are very similar objectives to those in place at the Contidrom 50 years ago, when engineers Ulsamer, Weber and Meyer wrote test history with the e-car.