testing autonomous car
Inside Honda's ghost town for testing autonomous cars
This former town within a Naval base -- now dubbed "GoMentum Station" -- works to Honda's advantage. It's a nearly turn-key solution to the problem of finding somewhere to test an autonomous vehicle inside an urban area. The automaker has access to 20 miles of various road types, intersections and the infrastructure it would encounter in the real world. Just, you know, without all the people getting in the way. While the faded lane markers and cracked asphalt might make it difficult for the car to figure out what's going on around it, that's exactly what you want when training a self-driving system.