Jaguar Land Rover is showing off a prototype Range Rover Sport that can be remote-controlled via smartphone. Your James Bond fantasies are one step closer to reality.
The experimental prototype Remote Control Range Rover Sport does exactly what the name implies: Via a smartphone app, the driver can pilot the vehicle from a short distance away, controlling steering, accelerator and brake, gear shift position, and selection of high or low range.
In video demonstration, the system looks pretty nifty. Presented as an off-roader’s helper, it allows the driver to check approach and departure angles and proximity to nearby obstacles without having to hop in and out of the driver’s seat after every tiny maneuver. And for those whose Range Roving doesn’t extend beyond the shopping center parking lot, we see that the system could be plenty helpful when inattentive drivers park too close for you to enter your driver’s door.
What kind of driver would do that? Jaguar Land Rover seems to pinpoint a particular brand of car owner:
Now, of course, there are limitations: The system—which, we must emphasize, is entirely experimental at the moment—only works if the user is within about 30 feet (10 meters) of the vehicle, and the car will automatically stop if the driver gets too close or too far away. And the car will only accelerate up to 4 mph while under smartphone control.
Land Rover also showed off a new Multi-Point Turn feature, where the car can autonomously perform a tight turnaround, taking care of shifting, accelerating, braking and steering all by itself.
Jaguar Land Rover was careful to present this new technology with slow, gentle maneuvers in uncrowded environments. Probably because the engineers knew anything else would remind us of the first appearance of this type of remote-control technology: the 1997 James Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies.
This story originally appeared on roadandtrack.com.
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