Gadgetory

when you hear the words self racing cars you probably imagine high-end autonomous vehicles zipping around a track at dizzying speeds well not really in late May a dozen or so teams came to California's Thunderhill Raceway to participate in what was called the first installment of the self racing cars series I'm trying to do something that's that's more about like the not so much spectator sport but but love of engineering people want to build stuff they want interesting challenges to build you know that's that's what I'm trying to do I want people to be able to feel the competitive vehicle for less than 10 grand racing is an exaggeration though there weren't actually any races that weekend and with no qualifying rules the event attracted a motley crew investors high-end parts suppliers and two guys at the Power Wheels car a lot of these cars couldn't even make it around the track on their own it was more of an opportunity for drivers and engineers to come test their technology find potential partners or customers or just trade notes with fellow enthusiasts this event Thunderhill I think is incredibly valuable to the autonomous community because how many times were you can have a track day for this sort of thing it's still really new I mean a lot of this technology you hear it in the news all the time but there's still a lot of testing miles there's still a lot of things that need to be done and the reason why I think this is fantastic is that I mean racing has made innovations for vehicles for the past 100 years I mean we're this weekend's the Indy 500 it started in nineteen eleven the average speed was 70 miles an hour now it's over 220 miles an hour that right there is proof of how motorsports our technology movers so what's really interesting about this event is that we're a one e way of looking at we're just reinventing the wheel right there's nothing here that Google hasn't already done but you can take a google autonomous car and put on this racetrack and they'll do absolutely fine and I think the point is exactly the same point that Jobs and Wozniak had when they had the homebrew Computer Club yeah the Apple 2 was not the first computer or the best computer is probably the worst computer but it took a different evolutionary path you know unlike you know the mainframe getting you know faster smaller etc this the PC ended up it going in a different direction and the hope here that this will go in a different direction then we're not just gonna end up with another Google Thomas car you something that Google wouldn't dare or want to do tens of thousands of people are dying everyday right in the globe because of automated technologies are not enabling to save their lives right and for me personally also I have a special needs child right a special needs child that will probably never be able to actually drive his car by himself so this can enable him to live a normal life and I'm not alone there we're not just racing cars here I think that we're really changing the future and and adding quality of life to to millions of people in the world as the technology advances over the next few years we'll definitely be watching self-driving races next year there's an all-electric autonomous race launching called Robo race well it's off racing car series be a DIY alternative maybe but that's still at least a few years off first these teams will have to teach their cars to make it around the track then the soft racing car series might actually be a race