Seat Leon on the road autonomously as ‘Diana’

While Tesla in the US is already fully acquainting owners with self-driving cars in practice, other brands are still busy developing these. This also applies to Seat, which now sends a Leon onto the road that takes most of the tasks off the driver’s hands. Seat calls the Leon in question ‘Diana’, in his own words a reference to the Roman goddess and patron saint of the same name. The car was developed by Seat in collaboration with the Automotive Technology Center of Galicia and is now driving on closed stretches of road and parking lots.

The Seat Leon is equipped with five lidar sensors, five radars, six cameras, twelve ultrasound machines and eight computers that together give the car a 360 degree ‘view’ of its surroundings. It enables the Leon to level 3 autonomous driving. This means that the driver can largely outsource driving, but still have to keep an eye on the public road.

Seat distinguishes three different functions: Autonomous Chauffeur, Automated Valet Parking and Summoning. The first function ensures that the driver no longer has to carry out starting and stopping maneuvers at low speeds. Automated Valet Parking means that the car can perform a parking action itself without the occupant’s intervention. After all, summoning is the most comprehensive feature. This allows the Leon to pick up someone at a desired location and then take it to a destination itself. The car can then be called up via an app, after which it will pull up and open the doors to let you get in.

The latter would mean that the car partly drives independently without anyone in it, which is level 5 autonomous driving. However, that is not yet possible on public roads, but Seat is already testing it on closed stretches of road. It is not yet known when we can experience level 3 autonomous driving in a Seat. Thanks to Diana it is at least one step closer.