Watch Ford’s autonomous car test-drive in pitch black night conditions

Earlier this year, Ford announced that its fully autonomous cars will hit the streets of California this year. The company has already tested its driverless tech on public roads in Michigan and was the first automaker to test a fully autonomous vehicle at Mcity – the 32-acre, full-scale simulated real-world urban environment at the University of Michigan.

Now, the company has taken its autonomous vehicle to the Ford Arizona Proving Ground to test out its LiDAR technology in complete darkness. The development  shows that even without cameras, which rely on light, Ford’s LiDAR and virtual driver software can steer the car around winding roads.

Ford has been using Velodyne LiDAR sensors for almost 10 years. The innovation has made an impact on the autonomous vehicle landscape. LiDAR emits short pulses of laser light to precisely scan the surrounding environment millions of times per second and determine the distance to objects, allowing the vehicle to create a real-time, high-definition 3D image of whatever’s around it.

Video via Ford