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WELCOME TO CARS
The Center for Automotive Research at Stanford

Program Director:    Prof. Chris Gerdes
Executive Director:     Sven Beiker, PhD

CARS is the interdisciplinary automotive research program at Stanford University. The vision of CARS is to create a community of faculty and students from a range of disciplines at Stanford with leading industry researchers to radically re-envision the automobile for unprecedented levels of safety, performance, sustainability, and enjoyment. Our mission is to discover, build, and deploy the critical ideas and innovations for the next generation of cars and drivers.

CARS acts as an automotive community to encourage automotive:
Research - Education - Outreach

Recent CARS News

Prof. Clifford Nass lectured on "Multitasking while Driving"
Prof. Clifford Nass explained the recent study on multitasking and put it in context with driving an automobile. The discussion in the class "The Future of the Automobile" put attention on the fact that a growing population might consider the driving task "secondary" and that cars need to be designed differently to address this trend.
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Interview with Sebastian Thrun - Next Autonomous Challenge SF - LA
Prof. Sebastian Thrun was interviewed by GetRobo, an online magazine on robots for home and community. He talks about the past competitions, the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, and also about the next big goal: an autonomous drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles that is scheduled for Spring 2010.
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Stanford Autonomous Car Takes On High Speed Rally
The research team at the Dynamic Design Lab lead by Prof. Gerdes and the engineers at Volkswagen designed a car that can drive autonomously (almost) as fast as a race driver. The vehicle was unveiled at the “Driving Dynamics” Event on Oct 24 and has since been generating a lot of press.
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