An enclosed, armored seat. Cameras and sensors to see through the walls. Crew augmentation. And a fighter-jet style cockpit. DARPA's Ground X-Vehicle Technologies concept is the future fever dream of armored troop transportation.
Alright, so I'm not going to go ahead and say THIS IS DEFINITELY THE FUTURE OF ARMORED PERSONNEL CARRIERS RIGHT HERE TOTALLY HAPPENING, because the joy of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is mostly just to imagine. It's to think of not only what the future could be, but what the future could be, and apply those ideas to warfighting.
Which is also not to say that all of those ideas are solely for the purpose of killing some people and saving others. A lot of DARPA ideas have filtered their way down to civilian life, like Siri (the CALO project), modern driverless vehicles, and *ahem* The Internet.
So that's what makes DARPA's GXV-T so exciting. Created as a way to not only increase physical survivability on the battlefield, the designs created by the program seek to reduce crew workload, access any terrain, reduce weight, and double the top speed.
Yeah, DARPA's basically trying to create an armored, easy-to-drive, go-anywhere race car. That's not so bad.
To that end, the GXV-T has no windows. The driver sits in an armored box, and high-definition cameras and infrared sensors watch the outside, and display the outside world on television screens. There isn't a steering wheel so much as it is an airplane-style yoke. Information is displayed right in front of the operator, like a giant Heads-Up Display. And then everything can be changed to the infrared portion of the spectrum, for ultimate visibility.
Oh, and the computer can also tell you which is the best line to take for maximum velocity.
If all of this technology makes it into your car one day, it might just be the best car ever.
Jalopnik.com/
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