Want a spooky car story? How about this: driverless cars, trekking across Eastern Europe, Russia, Kazakhstan and the Gobi Desert - more than 8,000 miles.  Better than a headless horseman, if you ask us: At one point, a driverless van stopped to give a hitchhiker a lift.  Four driverless electric vans successfully ended a 8,000-mile test drive from Italy to China with their arrival at the Shanghai Expo on Thursday.  The vehicles, equipped with four solar-powered laser scanners and seven video cameras that work together to detect and avoid obstacles, are part of an experiment aimed at improving road safety and advancing automotive technology.  Sensors on the vehicles enabled them to navigate through wide extremes in road, traffic and weather conditions, while collecting data to be analyzed for further research, in a study sponsored by the European Research Council.  Researchers didn't know the best way to navigate the route and didn't know what kind of conditions to expect along the way. "We encountered the lot," said Isabella Fredriga, a research engineer for the project.  Though the vans were driverless and mapless, they did carry researchers as passengers just in case of emergencies:  Notice the guy behind the wheel in the photo at top. The experimenters did have to intervene a few times -- when the vehicles got snarled in a Moscow traffic jam and to handle toll stations.  A computerized artificial vision system dubbed GOLD, for Generic Obstacle and Lane Detector, analyzed the information from the sensors and automatically adjusted the vehicles' speed and direction. The whole thing was controlled from a personal computer.  "This steering wheel is controlled by the PC. So the PC sends a command and the steering wheel moves and turns and we can follow the road, follow the curves and avoid obstacles with this," said Alberto Broggi of Vislab at the University of Parma in Italy, the lead researcher for the project.  The vehicles ran at maximum speeds of 38 miles per hour (60 kilometers per hour) and had to be recharged for eight hours after every two to three hours of driving. At times, it was monotonous and occasionally nerve-racking, inevitably due to human error, Fredriga said.  To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor  . For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to  . Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to
Spooky driverless cars trek 8,000 miles across Asia - Drive On: A conversation about the cars and trucks we drive - USATODAY.com