Autonomous Cars Having A Rough Time Doing Off-Roading

13 min readJul 6, 2019

Dr. Lance Eliot, AI Insider

Green laning. Mudding. Rock crawling. Dune bashing.

These are all various kinds of off-road driving experiences.

For those of you that happen to own or use an Off-Road Vehicle (ORV), I’m sure that you are smiling right now as I mention such aspects such as green laning, which involves driving an ORV on forest trails in a greenery environment, or perhaps you are more akin to doing dune bashing, which involves rolling up and down sand dunes at the beach.

Rock crawling can be particularly scary as you inch your ORV over the top of rocks and sometimes try to scale large-scale rock formations, doing so at steep and rather precarious angles. I

n contrast, mudding usually involves splashing and slipping and sliding your way through gooey mud. The mud wants to cling to every pore of the ORV and can even blind the driver by coating the windshield with a nearly impenetrably thick layer of mishmash dank mud.

Type Of Vehicle For Off-Roading

Do you have to use a specially equipped vehicle to do off-roading?

No, you don’t, and it all depends on what kind of off-road circumstance you are facing.

If you want to get or craft an ORV, there are lots of auto makers that provide consumer-oriented trucks, jeeps, and SUV’s that are built for doing off-roading.

Some ORV’s are classified as RTV’s (Road Taxed Vehicles).

An RTV is considered street-legal and able to drive on our everyday public roads, along with then shifting into an off-roading mode once the situation presents itself. Or, it could be that you opt to get an ORV that is not legally able to traverse on conventional roads, and if so you are likely to have a CCV (Cross Country Vehicle). The beauty for some off-roaders of having a CCV is that you can add or subtract automotive components and do so without having to be worried that you’ll get a ticket for driving it on normal streets. These kinds of off-roaders will trick out their ORV with an anything-goes mindset.

Formally Defining Off-Roading