Driverless racing is real, terrible, and strangely exciting
We live in a weird time for autonomous vehicles. Ambitions come and go, but genuinely autonomous cars are further off than solid-state vehicle batteries. Part of the problem with developing autonomous cars is that teaching road cars to take risks is unacceptable.
A race track, though, is a decent place to potentially crash a car. You can take risks there, with every brutal crunch becoming a learning exercise. (You’d be hard-pressed to find a top racing driver without a few wrecks smoldering in their junior career records.)
That's why 10,000 people descended on the Yas Marina race track in Abu Dhabi to watch the first four-car driverless race. The organizers of the Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League (A2RL) event didn’t brief me on what to expect, so I wasn't sure if we would see much car movement. Not because the project was likely to fail—it certainly had a lot of hardware and software engineering behind it, not to mention plenty of money. But creating a high-speed, high-maneuverability vehicle that makes its own choices is an immense challenge.
