Inside the Races That Jump-Started the Self-Driving Car

[DooKey]

Back in 2004 self-driving cars were just a sci-fi dream. However, the good folks at DARPA started the Urban Challenge at an abandoned Air Force base in LA, cars were expected to move through intersections, merge into traffic, and find their own parking spaces. Based on this experience DARPA decided to put on a race with a $1 million prize for whoever built a self-driving car that drove 142 miles through the Mojave Desert the fastest. The rest is history and now we have self-driving cars all over the place compared to those early days. Check out the video at Wired (WARNING auto play video).

"Anybody could show up, and you saw everybody show up," says Melanie Dumas, a software engineer who had a day job working on voice recognition for use in Abrams tanks, and was exactly the sort of person Darpa hoped might be able to make a driverless car. "It felt like it was anybody's game."