Driverless: Land Rover Defender gets remote control function

Land Rover says it wants to give its upcoming new Defender remote control capability.

The new system should enable lone drivers to conquer especially challenging off-road areas, where the angle of view from the driver’s seat is limited and no one is around to offer help. The British carmaker claims such situations actually happen pretty often. Making the new Defender remotely steerable would enable easy navigation even in otherwise nigh-impassable areas.

That said, the Chief Engineer responsible for the project points out that getting the car out of a mud hole or similar predicament would still require driver’s skill, as no amount of on-board sensors, scanners and cameras can best an experienced human driver at this point.

It should be noted that, while quite a few premium-priced cars, such as those produced by BMW and Mercedes-Benz, have limited remote control capabilities, those are almost exclusively used to squeeze into a tight parking spot and then get back out on the road. Developing something like this for bad off-road conditions is massively more challenging.

Still, the company says the feature is already being actively tested on multiple vehicles, and making it available for the new Defender series is more of a legal issue than technical.