Berkeley duo's plan to solve traffic jams: hyper-fast lanes for self-driving cars

These days there are so many self-driving cars coming down the pipeline it seems inevitable they'll soon be stuck in a robot traffic jam – just like the human-piloted cars of today. Well, not if Anthony Barrs and Baiyu Chen get their way. The two graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, have devised a system that would have tightly-packed clusters of autonomous vehicles zipping past local traffic at speeds of more than 100mph, all on existing roadways. They call it Hyperlane, and it works a lot like high-speed toll lanes already do, only with a central computer controlling everything. Although fully autonomous cars are not yet legal on most public roads, manufacturers like Volvo and Tesla already offer autonomous features on their vehicles – adaptive cruise control and, in some cases, systems that steer the car with limited driver input.