Well, I guess it's hard to beat the publicity factor for a car company of being able to say, "We built a freakin' lunar rover."
Nothing is mentioned about how they plan to get the rover to the Moon though, which is, I gather, generally considered a fairly important part of the process. Target date is end of 2017.
Via Joerg Fliege.
Originally shared by Thomas Ortiz
http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/11/10746926/audi-lunar-rover-xprize-detroit-auto-show-2016
Building a rover is one thing. Successfully deploying it and having it actually work is something else entirely.
ReplyDeleteThe Russians did that back in the sixties.
Anything spacey is years of R&D. They may be thinking: "well, Elon is sending people to Mars. This people are gonna want their Audis self-driving cars. Google Maps Offline is already a thing - what are we waiting for? BMW to do it first?"
ReplyDeleteThere are likely to be a number of moon launches in 2017 in attempt to win the XPrize. Audi may be planning on hitching a ride on one of those; or buying a ride from one teams that didn't make it first.
ReplyDeleteThe latter seems plausible "Well, we can't win the 30 million prize; but Audi's willing to buy what we've got for 15 million, and that'll cover our expenses. So we'll make their robot the payload instead."