- Xiaomi YU7 completes Nürburgring lap without a driver onboard.
- Video footage cornering suggests human novices could match it.
- Speed limiter likely cost valuable seconds along famous final straight.
Xiaomi has added another Nürburgring achievement to its growing collection, but this one comes with a lap time that’d ordinarily elect yawns, not cheers. Because instead of chasing outright lap records with a professional driver at the wheel, the company has sent a YU7 GT around the Nordschleife with nobody in the driver’s seat at all.
The result was a lap of 10 minutes and 29.483 seconds, making it the first driverless car to complete a full timed lap of the old Northern Loop. That’s certainly an impressive technical accomplishment, even if it’s over 3 minutes slower than the 7:22.76 achieved by a YU7 GT with a race driver behind the wheel last month, which set a new SUV record.
A 10-Minute Lap Worth Talking About
It’s been a while since anyone got excited about a 10-minute Nurburgring lap time. Jeremy Clarkson managed a 9:59 in a Jaguar S-type diesel in 2004, and the late, great Sabine Schmitz very nearly matched it at the wheel of a Ford Transit van, again on Top Gear, nine months later.
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Watch the onboard footage of the driverless Xiaomi and it’s immediately obvious that the YU7 GT isn’t attacking the circuit. It approaches corners cautiously, leaves comfortable margins and generally behaves like a driver who’s well aware that crashing a prototype into a barrier would create the wrong kind of headline.
Where it does claw back time is on the exits. The instant torque of the 990 hp (1,003 PS / 738 kW) electric powertrain allows the SUV to fire itself down straights, helping offset the conservative approach through many of the Nordschleife’s faster and more intimidating sections.
Man Vs Machine
That cautious attitude raises an interesting question. If you’ve never driven the Nürburgring before, could you go quicker? Many Carscoops readers would probably fancy their chances. A 10 minute 29 second lap isn’t slow, especially on a circuit packed with blind crests, tricky cambers and more than 70 corners. But it also isn’t the sort of time that suggests the autonomous system is operating anywhere near the limit of the car’s capabilities.
In fact, the YU7 GT appears to leave a little time on the table for another reason. Along the 1.3-mile (2.1 km) Döttinger Höhe straight, the SUV quickly reaches its 131 mph (210 kmh) limiter and then simply sits there. You can almost see the seconds ticking away as the car continues flat-out but goes no faster. Remove the restriction and the final lap time would’ve likely fallen by at least a couple of seconds.
Impressive, But Not The Whole Story
Of course, a fast autonomous lap isn’t necessarily proof of anything in everyday traffic, and we’ve no idea what data the YU7 was relying on to know when to accelerate and brake. It obviously wasn’t just using its regular Lidar sensor to cruise around like it would on the streets of Shanghai.
Still, it’s an intriguing demonstration of how far the technology has come. The robots may not be ready to trouble human Nürburgring record holders just yet, but you just know they’ll get there, and maybe sooner rather than later.
