Stanford Builds Autonomous DeLorean That Likes To Hoon

Normally when we talk about autonomous cars they are rather boring looking cars designed to silently drive people down the road while they play on their smartphones. The main goal is to take workload off the often-distracted drivers and reduce traffic and accidents on the road. Researchers at Stanford have built a new autonomous car they have dubbed Marty.

As any child of the '80s will know, Marty is the character Michael J. Fox played in the Back to the Future Franchise where the DeLorean was a time machine. The team at Stanford must have figured if you are going to build an autonomous car, you might as well do it with style.

Marty the autonomous DeLorean isn't designed to simply cruise down the street silently and safely, Marty is designed to get up to parking lot shenanigans like a teen driving dad's car for the first time. This autonomous car is specifically designed to drift in massive smoky donuts.

Marty does a fine job of drifting around parking lots and had the normal anemic V6 that the DeLorean had from the factory replaced with an electric motor and battery packs. The short video not only shows a bit of the transformation of the car, it also shows the autonomous hooning.