The Verge Journalist Umar Shakir reported on TRI and Stanford Engineering's achievement of the world's first fully autonomous tandem drift sequence.

"Toyota Research Institute (TRI) and Stanford are plugging AI into two Supras that pull off Formula Drift-style tandem driving — but they’re looking for something more important than style points," Shakir wrote.

Shakir quoted TRI's vice president of the Human Interactive Driving division, Avinash Balachandran, who said this milestone has far-reaching implications for building advanced safety systems into future automobiles.

"Beyond the impressive showing, which can be seen in a video, professor Chris Gerdes, who codirects the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford, says the physics of drifting is similar to the behavior of cars on snow or ice," Shakir wrote. "Balachandran adds that the tech can kick in precisely in time to manage a driver’s loss of control, just like expert drifters. The system can solve and re-solve a problem up to 50 times per second to decide what steering, throttle, and brake commands work best in the conditions."

Read the full story here.