We have to say, we like the approach that Stanford University's Chris Gerdes takes when it comes to self-driving cars. Several years ago, Prof. Gerdes and his students taught an Audi TTS called Shelley how to lap a race track. This week, he and his team at Stanford's Revs program unveiled their latest work, MARTY the DeLorean.

Although the name—and the choice of car and date of the announcement—all pay tribute to Back to the Future, MARTY is no time machine. Rather, the Multiple Actuator Research Test bed for Yaw control would be more at home in a different film franchise: Fast and Furious.

MARTY was designed to go drifting. "The laws of physics will limit what the car can do, but we think the software should be capable of any possible maneuver within those limits. MARTY is another step in this direction thanks to the passion and hard work of our students. Stanford builds great research by building great researchers," Gerdes said.

Right now MARTY's drifting has been tested in wide open spaces, but Gerdes and his students plan to teach it how to drift around a race track. Gerdes hopes that MARTY will eventually compete against human drifters (the sport, which is judged, involves two rivals drifting the same course at the same time).

MARTY is quite heavily modified under its brushed stainless steel skin. Out went the old V6 engine and transmission (the drivetrain was never the car's highpoint) as well as the steering. In their place went replacements from Renovo, a Silicon Valley-based electric vehicle company. Renovo's new electric motor gives MARTY 4,000 lb-ft of torque apparently, which is quite an upgrade from the car's original 153 lb-ft.

Stanford isn't the only university playing around with old DeLoreans. Over in the UK, Queen's University in Belfast (where DeLoreans were made) have also restored and then converted one of the cars to electric power. With today being the day that Marty McFly traveled forward into the future, it seems it's the season for it.