Wolfsburg, 04 October 2007 - The second leg of its museum tour around the world now takes the Volkswagen Touareg Stanley to sunny springtime South Africa. Having completed the first part of the tour in Singapore, Stanley will now be on display at the Sci-Bono Discovery Centre in Johannesburg, the country??s commercial capital.

Stanley is the first car to successfully complete the Grand Challenge, having in November 2005 autonomously travelled a distance of 212 kilometres across the Mojave Dessert in the USA ?? no driver on board, no outside manipulation. The contest was organised by the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an agency of the US Department of Defense.

Stanley incorporates numerous driver-assistance systems which are already available in series-standard vehicles. It also features a special high-tech package consisting of laser detectors, stereo-vision devices, radar sensors and highly precise GPS systems.

This prototype was built as a joint project by the Stanford University in California (which gave the vehicle its name), the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory, also located in California, and Volkswagen Research and Development in Wolfsburg.

The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. regards the Stanley Project as a pioneer project and devoted a special exhibition to it last autumn. This show in the world??s biggest technology museum is now being followed by a tour which is taking Stanley to some of the key international exhibition sites for technology history.

The first stop on that tour was Singapore in June 2007, where the Touareg attracted some 70,000 visitors to the Science Centre of the city state to inspect the vehicle and find out more about the course the project has taken at interactive multimedia terminals set up as part of the display. Half a dozen TV stations covered Stanley??s appearance there. Scientists, representatives from industry and journalists from the region came together on the occasion to attend a conference dedicated to the Stanley Project.

While on its journey from Asia to Africa, Stanley has been eagerly awaited in Johannesburg. Days before work on the installation of the show there even got underway, visitors to the Sci-Bono Discovery Centre were already making inquiries about the automobile. The exhibition will be officially opened on October 3. Representatives from the media, industry and the science community, students and Volkswagen dealers based in South Africa have all been invited to attend this Open Day.

Sci-Bono is the biggest exhibition centre for technology and science in Africa. It derives its name from a combination of the terms ??science?? and ??bono??, which, in one of the South African tribal languages, means ??show??. The Sci-Bono Discovery Centre is run by the ministry of education for the Province of Gauteng. Opened in 2004, it was founded as part of a broader programme of redevelopment which in recent years has helped re-invigorate the central business district of Johannesburg.

On a display space of more than 5,000 square metres in a former electricity plant, the Sci-Bono Discovery Centre exhibits technology milestones and invites visitors to experiment with scientific exhibits. Workshops and educational programmes for school students (and especially girls) from underprivileged districts of the city are designed to create barrier-free access to the sciences and to draw attention to vocational opportunities in the field of engineering and technology.

Stanley will be in Johannesburg until November 7 and will then move on to the transportation section of Deutsche Museum in Munich, where it will be on display from 22 December 2007.

Source: [url=http://www.trucktrend.com/features/news/2007/163_news071012_volkswagen_touareg_stanley]TruckTrend Magazine[/url]