 Comfort, convenience, safety, all characteristics you might reasonably associate with the concept of self-driving cars. Unless you're in a BMW self-driving car CES that is. In that case you're looking at adjectives like crazy, insane, nerve-wracking. We went out to Las Vegas Motor Speedway a few miles from our home base here in Sim City to check out a new research project at BMW where company engineers push self-driving cars to their hairy limits. The official company line is that it's all done in the name of safety, but in reality it's the most terrifying fun you can have at the hands of a fully automated robotic car. I had the chance to ride one of them and it's a seriously surreal experience. The driver, or more accurately the passenger sitting in the driver's seat, presses a couple buttons before the car simply takes over and blasts through a twisty track with no regard for the ham sandwich still sitting in your stomach. The icing on the cake came on lap two where BMW had intentionally wet the track to induce a prolonged oversteer. The car handled it perfectly, steering through the slippery turn better than most humans could and recovering without skipping a beat. In other words the car wasn't really self-driving, it was self-drifting. But as I mentioned before BMW says this madness is all in the name of safety. How can we control a car in very critical situations at the border of driving dynamics when the car starts to drift, how can we pull it back on the road and how can we manage the critical situation as a very important part of setting up a complete system for real autonomous driving. One touch access to automated high speed joyrides might not ever make it to production, but BMW says that the research it runs here will help it get you a fully automated car by 2020 with many variations of partial automation long before that. In fact many of the technologies linked to self-driving like dynamic cruise control and lane detection have been in production cars for several years now. So I pay extra for this, way extra.
 Comfort, convenience, safety, all characteristics you might reasonably associate with the concept
 of self-driving cars.
 Unless you're in a BMW self-driving car CES that is.
 In that case you're looking at adjectives like crazy, insane, nerve-wracking.
 We went out to Las Vegas Motor Speedway a few miles from our home base here in Sim City
 to check out a new research project at BMW where company engineers push self-driving
 cars to their hairy limits.
 The official company line is that it's all done in the name of safety, but in reality
 it's the most terrifying fun you can have at the hands of a fully automated robotic
 car.
 I had the chance to ride one of them and it's a seriously surreal experience.
 The driver, or more accurately the passenger sitting in the driver's seat, presses a couple
 buttons before the car simply takes over and blasts through a twisty track with no regard
 for the ham sandwich still sitting in your stomach.
 The icing on the cake came on lap two where BMW had intentionally wet the track to induce
 a prolonged oversteer.
 The car handled it perfectly, steering through the slippery turn better than most humans
 could and recovering without skipping a beat.
 In other words the car wasn't really self-driving, it was self-drifting.
 But as I mentioned before BMW says this madness is all in the name of safety.
 How can we control a car in very critical situations at the border of driving dynamics
 when the car starts to drift, how can we pull it back on the road and how can we manage
 the critical situation as a very important part of setting up a complete system for real
 autonomous driving.
 One touch access to automated high speed joyrides might not ever make it to production, but
 BMW says that the research it runs here will help it get you a fully automated car by 2020
 with many variations of partial automation long before that.
 In fact many of the technologies linked to self-driving like dynamic cruise control and
 lane detection have been in production cars for several years now.
 So I pay extra for this, way extra.