A report from China Daily details a successful 286km trip by a vehicle from the National University of Defense Technology.

According to the report the vehicle did fully autonomous highway driving, and did not use GPS, just LIDAR, radar and vision systems. Modern robocars do not rely exclusively on GPS, as it is both inaccurate and goes out in certain regions, but they do like to use it to help them localize, so not using it at all suggests a good localizer. They also report handling fog, thunderstorms and poor lane markers, all good acheivements.

There is what appears to be a machine translated article with some photos. The external photo seems to show an unmodified car, the internal one shows what appear to be two stereo cameras left and right, though the article talks mostly about LIDAR and radar, not vision systems. Dai Bin, spokesman for the team has published papers on both LIDAR based obstacle avoidance and vision systems similar to the one used by Stanley in the Darpa desert challenge for off-road use.

It will be interesting to hear more about the work of this team.

In other news, BMW has announced that its 2014 i3 battery-electric car will also offer a combination of lane-keeping and adaptive cruise control](http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1064191_2014-bmw-i3-moves-us-closer-to-autonomous-driving-in-cities) while under 25mph, effectively being a "stop and go traffic autopilot." This is an interesting early offering, since it's easier to put this together at low speeds in the controlled highway environment.

Also included will be a detection system for impeding collisions which can apply the brakes, and a fully automatic parallel parking system (most earlier systems still needed human control of the brake, causing amusing-if-it's-not-you accidents for people who didn't think they had to do anything.)