The most rewarding part of attending CES is the interactive demos, hands down. One of the most intriguing demos this year was courtesy Renesas, where John Buszek, the company’s Segment Marketing Manager for ADAS Solutions took me for a ride in a Cadillac SRX retrofitted with eight lidar, five radar, and forward cameras running on two RCar H2 SoCs and Harbrick PolySync autonomous driving software, and a DSRC communications module controlled by Renesas’ W2R and RCar E2 SoCs. Together, these technologies make up the RDrive Autonomous Driving Rapid Prototyping platform.

The result was (and remains) a real-world proof of concept for the path to autonomous driving. During the ride, the system demonstrated not only image detection and recognition capabilities using the radar, lidar, and cameras, but also was able to show vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications between the Cadillac and a traffic signal.

In May 2016 Renesas plans to upgrade the Skyline Fleet (branding the company uses to collectively refer to the vehicles outfitted with this technology) with R-Car H3 SoCs that will provide 80,000 DMIPS and 650 GFLOPS of performance and DDR4 memory in a 16 nm package, certified to ASIL level B, as well as an ASIL D-certified RH850/P1x MCU for chassis control and enhanced safety functions. But, to see today’s system in action, check out our trip below.