If you were developing autonomous vehicles, how would you test them? If you're Volkswagen, you use virtual people.

No, I don't mean androids or anything like that. Testing self-driving cars can be difficult. They aren't allowed on public roads until they're deemed safe enough to do so, which means most testing happens on private roads. But if you want to know how the car is doing against real people, you'd need real people. The automaker is looking to supplement that aspect of the road with their own virtual drivers.

They call it "virtual validation," a digital method of testing the "smart" side of self-driving cars. Instead of testing the autonomy software on real roads, the var is plugged into a virtual world, dubbed "SimFAS." This world will contain thousands of potential scenarios on the road to test the self-driving cars against. This includes traffic jams, merging scenarios, you name it. The system could even connect to the cloud to learn new scenarios by the hundreds.

The first bunch of scenarios already developed by Volkswagen are parking lots. SimFAS can already generate thousands of different parking lots, ranging in shape, size, and conditions. 

This can potentially allow automakers to run tests on their vehicles at a rate quite literally 100 times faster than setting them up in the physical world.

If the project proves effective, we could see a dramatic boost in the development of fully self-driving vehicles. They may even become more mainstream.