According to recent news agencies, reporters were given the opportunity to ride in the back seat of Audi’s new autonomous vehicle during the Consumer Electronics Show.

The Audi A6 Avant is a piloted driving vehicle with semi-autonomous features. According to recent news, the technology Audi has developed in order to engineer this model is being tested on public roads in Nevada.

The vehicle is equipped with a particular technology known as “traffic-jam assist”, which is a function that was demonstrated while reporters were on board. Audi has reported that future vehicles will be equipped with the feature, which will be available as a low-speed autonomous functionality. This feature was developed as an extension of Audi’s adaptive cruise control technology combined with lane-keeping assist qualities.

According to the reports, Audi was the first automaker to obtain a license to test the autonomous technology on the roads in Nevada.

Since the traffic-jam assist technology this vehicle is equipped with does not make this model a fully autonomous car, the technology was designed to simply work in sub-40 mph situations while the vehicle is traveling on highways. As soon as the vehicle starts driving faster or traffic isn’t very dense, the traffic assist feature is cut out automatically.

Audi has combined its lane-keeping assist camera technology, its radar-based adaptive cruise control system and the new bumper-mounted light detection and ranging laser in order to send information to the vehicle’s software, which will be translated into commands and the vehicle will steer itself safely as a result. If the driver wants to relinquish the steering control, he or she can apply a significant torque to the steering wheel, which will promptly lead to the cutting of the semi-autonomous feature.

Reporters claimed that while they were on the back seat of Audi’s piloted driving vehicle, no incidents occurred and the system, which is a semi-autonomous technology, seemed to work just as planned.

According to Audi, these vehicles are equipped with rear-seat-mounted joysticks that could be operated in case all systems mounted to the A6 happen to fail at the same time. During the periods in which the traffic-jam assist was on, the driver was able to do other things while the vehicle did all the heavy-lifting. The driver, for an instance, was able to watch a movie on the car’s central display, which was cut out as soon as the system deemed driver control was needed.

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