The world’s first self-driving car race on a professional track ended predictably, with a crash.

Automotive

As part of the Roborace competition held in Buenos Aires over the weekend, one of the two self-driving Devbot vehicles involved in the race slammed into a wall after miscalculating a particularly sharp turn.

At their best, both cars were driving in excess of 100 MPH, with one reaching a top speed of 115 MPH at one point.

One of the cars was trying to perform a manoeuvre, and it went really full-throttle and took the corner quite sharply and caught the edge of the barrier.

And the car received even more damage when it was loaded onto an towtruck : the operators misjudged the weight distribution, hooked it too far ahead of the center of balance and the entire rear of the crashed against asphalt.

It was not the only mistake on the day of the crane operators: they later destroyed a Formula E Jaguar by knocking down a bridge they hooked with the tow truck crane

Roborace has intimated that it plans to race 10 cars of this type against each other in future, with each running off different AI software.

In Argentina the Formula E just begins to generate some interest, but the competition went basically  unnoticed. Among local media, only Autoblog Argentina even reported on it.

Outside Argentina, the picture is the opposite. The Twitter account of these autonomous vehicles has 735 thousand followers: seven times more than the official account of Formula E.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39027477
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/shocker-world-first-self-driving-car-race-ends-194003812.html
http://autoblog.com.ar/2017/02/20/ironia-de-roborace-sobre-el-choque-en-puerto-madero-ningun-piloto-resulto-herido/

Automotive