Now that we are all caught up in the excitement of self-driving cars out on the streets, Roborace decided to go one step further and create one that could be used for racing purposes as well. Although, considering that racing is a test of the human driver’s skill with the wheel as much as it is of the car’s own capabilities, Roborace’s new car may just have made humans redundant in the future of car races.
The car looks like something straight out of the future, and instead of taking the easier path and getting its engineers and developers to retrofit and existing chassis with new hardware and autonomous software, Roborace has created a car from scratch. The results certainly look to have been well worth the efforts. The vehicle was unveiled today at the MWC by Roborace CEO Denis Sverdlov and Robocar designer automotive futurist Daniel Simon.
The company envisions a future where racing will be done by cars and computers. Cars will have on-board driving systems that will conduct them around the race tracks, all the while avoiding obstacles and overtaking competitors. The company even conducted a closed loop race in Buenos Aires just last week and while the cars took to the race quite well, the event ended with a crash.
However, Roborace is using the crash to stress its mission as well. As CEO Denis Sverdlow said during his presentation today, the company’s mission is a future where racing ceases to be a spot that has the potential for humans to get hurt and instead, becomes one in which the only role humans have is of being spectators. As Sverdlow said, no one was hurt during the crash because no one was in the cars.
As far as the company’s future plans are concerned, it wants to create 10 cars that are identical with each other and then provide them to 10 different teams. Each of these teams will then attempt to come up with the best self-driving software they can.
Well, the concept is certainly novel and I am sure AI and car lovers are going to go crazy over it. However, how will Roborace profit as a business? Since the cars are made for racing, it won’t have regular people purchasing the car to go to office. What’s more, its cars would probably be banned from professional racing since there are human drivers there and I am sure they wouldn’t feel comfortable with the idea of a car with no driver racing in their midst.
The company could of course, sell the software it creates, modify its cars to accommodate passengers, set up robo racing leagues and so on and so forth, The important thing at this stage is to come up with code that will allow the car to navigate racetracks and the company appears to be well on its path to do just that.
You can know more about the company by watching the video below:
