This morning at 8.00 (local time) we were ready to leave but we found a burned out headlight in one of the camper and we had to replace it.
We drove for 150 autonomous km in very difficult conditions: road still goes uphill, the traffic is cahotic and we continue to create queues due to our speed (sometimes it was only 30-35 km/h!).
We stopped to recharge vehicles and fix some little problems we had encountered in these days with CO2 sensors.

NOTE: since we left Tatarstan and entered Bashkortostan we changed time zone, actually we are at GMT+6.

Today we left Kazan in the afternoon, therefore we covered ‘only’ 135 autonomous km.
Driving the highway toward Siberia was very challenging, because of the traffic (big trucks everywhere…). Moreover the road went slightly uphill, so our speed was lower than normal.
This created a big queue and some vehicles made very risky overtakings!!
We are expected to arrive in Ufa tomorrow in the evening; at the moment we are still quite far from the destination, and we hope that tomorrow the driving will be safer than today.

Today another meeting with press and Vislab presentation in Kazan; the interest in our project is increasing every day!
Tomorrow we will leave (a bit later for logistic reasons) direction Ufa …the adventure goes on

Today we covered the remaining km to Kazan in autonomous mode; we met some journalists before reaching our hotel and answered their questions.

Kazan is a fascinating city, with a lot of beautiful monuments and churches but there is also a lot of traffic. The weather is quite cold, in the evening the temperature can go below 10 °C, and it’s summer time!!
Now we are at the ‘Giuseppe’ hotel, a very nice place, relaxing after a bath and a good dinner. Tomorrow, early in the morning, the new team is going to arrive and start immediatly to prepare the scheduled presentation.
We will let you know asap the program of next event. Good night!

A FTP site is now available at ftp://viac@ftp.vislab.it
Journalists are encouraged to upload their press material related to the VIAC expedition.
Please contact us to get the password.

NOTE: Be aware that the directory has write only permission, so you can’t see the contents.

OK, nothing special today: just another day of driving, recharging batteries, and driving. We are getting closer to Kazan where a new staff switch will happen: 4 people will get back to Parma and 5 new people will join the vehicles to assist them in new adventures. The people getting back to Parma will take with them a few hard disks with all the data acquired in the last shift (they squeezed everything down into 4 disks) while some fresh disks will replace them. We are planning on some recalibration and maintenance in Celiabinzk.

Today we reached 3000 autonomous km into our vehicles! We’re all very excited!

Sorry, guys, for not posting anything yesterday, but we’ve been quite busy with some maintenance: we made some tests to double check the vehicles’ autonomous driver. Nothing special: just a routine check, but it kept us busy for most of the afternoon. In the morning we traveled all the 140 km to reach Samara in autonomous mode. Again, it’s a shame to have reached our destination so quickly: we arrived even without recharging the batteries!

Today, presentation and demo in Samara (well, guys, we spent some time in the morning visiting Samara and its wonderful people). Talk to you again soon!

The lesson we learned yesterday during the demo in Saratov is the following: never ever give demos to a crowd of journalists all together in the vehicle! Why? Well, I’ll take a step back and tell you the full story.

Saratov. VisLab is preparing the demo. Everything works flawlessly. We decide to prepare a waypoint following demo: nothing special, but it is generally well received by journalists and spectators. It works: the vehicle moves in the area and follows a prerecorded set of GPS positions. Then the journalists come and ask for the strangest things (they always want some better image than their colleagues…). The vehicle is behaving so nicely that we decide to give a demo with journalists in front (driving seat and passenger seat) and their cameramen in the back seats. One of us is squeezed in one of the back seats to launch the demo and to finish it (with a laptop on his legs and quite limited movements). The demo starts. Everything goes well. When the demo is about to end, something strange happens and the vehicle does not stop at the last waypoint and continues moving: the speed constantly decreases but the vehicle keeps on moving until it touches another vehicle. Our staff was speechless, that was an unbelievable move of the vehicle, very strange and unpredicted. The media gets off and we don’t understand what prevented the vehicle from stopping at the last waypoint. Then we check the vehicle and it seems that one journalist (hopefully accidentally), maybe with his/her elbow or with the camera, kept pushing on the x-by-wire button, switching it off and on again a few times, thus the actuation was inhibited and the vehicle could not either steer or brake.

We are now going to analyze the full log to understand when this happened and what exactly are the consequences of this switching on and off, but whether this will be confirmed or not, we have learned that we will NEVER EVER give demos to many passengers at a time again. We will have at least two VisLab engineers on board: one to check the vehicle’s behavior, and one to check the passenger’s behavior!

Just for our readers which are not familiar with the vehicle setup, here’s a picture of the armrest in the back seat: it was designed so that all subsystems were easily reachable by our staff during the test, but it turns out that they are definitely too easily reachable also by other people during the demos.

This time we are convinced the problem is not due to a design issue but to a naive behavior of our crew: the vehicle is a test vehicle and these switches must be handy and placed in a convenient position.

Well, our lesson learned now is that we will now have to be careful about not only the vehicle but the passengers as well!

Side note: when we reached Saratov, the police escorted us to the hotel. They used their sirens and we made it to the hotel quite quickly since at each single intersections there were policemen stopping traffic to let us go. It was amazing! Not very ‘realistic’ traffic (and this is indeed what we are looking for), but amazing (and very efficient!).

We then reached our hotel; the police stopped for a while, some policemen entered the hotel while we were waiting for them in the vehicles; then they got out and told us that there was a secret meeting and we had to leave quickly. Then they took us in a parking lot quite far from that hotel, and informed us that it was quite unsafe to stay there… Well, we moved away quickly and reached another spot that our Overland partners judged safer. We are now waiting for the end of that secret meeting in order to reach our hotel…

Today we rode on our autonomous vehicles for about 230 km. We are now in Saratov, as planned, and tomorrow we’re scheduled to give a presentation and a demo.

230 autonomous km with our electric vehicles is definitely a long stretch of road (we covered it in 4 runs), but we are quite disappointed to have reached our destination so quickly today since we could have done much better than yesterday: today it was going very smoothly and we could have gone for even more km, but Saratov arrived quickly and we had to stop for the day. Yesterday we traveled autonomously for 279 km (which is indeed our record in a single day), and today we were prepared to break our previous record. Ok, we have more than two months ahead of us and we’ll try again to put together more than 279 km of autonomous driving in a single day!

Minor glitch to report: our odometer today suddenly stopped working and we had to stop our autonomous driving and start again. We started again and it stopped working again. Finally we disconnected it and used the speed provided by the GPS, which is not very precise but it’s a backup that we can use whenever our main odometer dies. These vehicles have a speedometer which is quite primitive and we had to prepare a replacement for it, which is now giving some problems. We already alerted our VisLab headquarters in Parma and they are preparing a possible fix.