In honor of ‘Back to the Future Day’ which all but enveloped the internet yesterday, Stanford University decided to take an old DeLorean and turn it into a self-drifting car.
The old and arguably awful V6 was tossed a way in favour of an electric drivetrain, and the steering rack was replaced with a powered-unit in order to keep it from understeering. The car, which was dubbed MARTY (Multiple Actuator Research Test bed for Yaw control) was a massive project with the sole goal of autonomously producing tire smoke.
The big question is then, why does the world need a self-drifting car, doesn’t that defeat the point of drifting? A director for the project, Chris Gerdes told Wired Magazine: “We think automated vehicles should be able to execute any maneuver within the physical limits of the vehicle to get out of harm’s way”. Roughly translated, they wanted to build a self-drifting car and needed to justify it. In any case, the resulting video is definitely entertaining: