Aidoptation can now test a fully self-driving car at highway speed on Belgian public roads. It is the first Level 4 permit of its kind in the European Union. The company announced the approval, which covers 100 km of the E313 and E314 motorways in Limburg.
Level 4 means the car handles everything, with no human needed to watch the road. That sets it apart from the driver-assist tools Europe has tested so far. Tesla’s FSD, for one, is Level 2 and keeps the human legally in charge. Aidoptation’s test car is a Maserati GranTurismo Folgore, an electric coupe carrying lidar, radar, cameras, and robotics hardware.
Built for the fast, deadly bit
Most self-driving attention goes to slow city robotaxis. Aidoptation is aiming at the opposite end. Its target is the motorway, where crashes are rarer but far more likely to kill. At 120 km/h, a car travels more than 50 metres in the 1.5 seconds an average driver takes to react.
The company grew out of the Indy Autonomous Challenge, a driverless racing series. Its engineers set an autonomous speed record of 318 km/h at the Kennedy Space Center in a driverless Maserati MC20. Its product, EdgeDrive, targets the split-second emergencies that appear at speed: sudden obstacles, hard avoidance, and low-grip surfaces.
