It's easy to think that once cars start driving themselves most of our traffic woes will be eliminated. Robocars are supposed to be better drivers and better driving should mean less gridlock. Unfortunately, that drop in bumper to bumper hell won't be as big as we all hoped, according to Audi's research. At Audi's Charged event (where it will unveil the E-Tron), the automaker gave Engadget a sneak peek at its latest 25th Hour Flow research. The company (along with Karlsruhe Institute for Technology and Munich's MobilityPartners) peered into the future to see how drivers and passengers can reclaim time thanks to autonomous driving and mobility options. During this year's research, Audi looked at traffic flow in Ingolstadt, Germany the home of its headquarters.

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.