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The wonders of technology: the iPhone can now be used to drive a car.
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IT seems there are very few limits to how smart our smartphones can get.
Computer scientists at Free University in Berlin have raised the bar with an iPhone application to remotely drive a car. Of course, this is no ordinary car.
Dubbed the Spirit of Berlin, it uses GPS, Wi-Fi, a dashboard video camera and laser 3D sensors to allow it to be driven remotely. At the end of all that technology is a customised iPhone application called iDriver which shows the view out of the windscreen and parts of the touch screen which can be used to steer, brake and accelerate.
In short, it is a similar system to that used by James Bond in Tomorrow Never Dies to escape from a sticky situation and way ahead of the simple shoe phone used by Maxwell Smart in Get Smart.
The range on the car is apparently good enough for the user to navigate it remotely all the way down a four-storey car park before the car picks up the driver. The car and the remote were both built by the Artificial Intelligence Group at the university, which is looking at how autonomous vehicles could change our lives in the future.
Project director Professor Raal Rojas said that in the not-too-distant future people would not need to have their own car, with driverless taxis taking people anywhere they wanted to go.
Cheap tyres 
Credit crunch 
Ford Fiesta 
Hyundai ix35
