Mercedes-AMG has surprised more than a few of us by sending a fully driverless AMG GT supercar to the North Loop, apparently so that it could gather telemetry for its advanced self-driving system.
Carscoops believes that the tri-point star automaker may have been pressured to compete by Xiaomi, who set a Nürburging world record for self-driving production cars earlier this summer. The AMG GT 63 prototype seen here didn’t seem ready to compete just yet, though, making a slow lap driving on the right-hand side of the track, then another slow lap on the left-hand side, and then finally attempting something like a speed run.
According to the spy photographers who were present at the scene, the first two laps took it around 25 minutes each. The final one lasted around 20 minutes. That’s a long shot from a record, so we suppose one wasn’t attempted.
Back in June, an all-electric and vacant Xiaomi YU7 GT drove itself through the Nürburgring in 10 minutes 29.5 seconds, setting a world record. Whether Mercedes-AMG is up to the task of beating it at its game is currently unknown – at any rate, AMG hasn’t been brave enough to admit doing these tests thus far.