Hi Everyone! So sorry for the slow update. First thing we did on last Wednesday morning was we sat together to organize, prioritize and distribute the remaining work among the group. It was a very productive and useful discussion as from then on, all of us are clearer about the tasks that each of us are responsible for. It also helped us to be more efficient.
Moving on... during that day, we all drove off to Stanford University to visit the VAIL, the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab. Sven and Sebastian showed us some really interesting cars with alternative power units and developed for autonomous driving, e.g. the solar-driven car “Junior” that participated in the DARPA Grand Challenges a few years ago.
During Day 3, we were invited to visit the Google Headquarters in Mountain View. Atari and her colleagues even gave us some feedback on our ideas before she showed us around on the impressively large campus. They even have company-owned bikes (of course in the typical green-yellow-red-blue design) to get from one place to the other! Pretty cool. Photo of the bike below:
The day was completed by a session at SAP on the “Internet of things” and M2M-communication. This was very interesting and astonishing again – I didn’t know that SAP was even building their own vending machines! This whole M2M business is for sure going to be a topic for the future, too – but for the moment we concentrated back on our Connected Car.
For a more visual impression on what our day was like, please have a look at the daily video, available from our facebook-page: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=381235061987606