The DIY Autonomous Cars Going Where Google Won't

On the weekend of May 28th, more than 400,000 people gathered at Indianapolis Motor Speedway to watch the 100th running of the Indianapolis 500. Machines worth millions of dollars flew around the 2.5-mile long course at speeds of 230 mph and faster.

The DIY Autonomous Cars Going Where Google Won't

The scene at California’s Thunderhill Raceway was decidedly more tame. Located three hours north of San Francisco in the golden foothills of the state’s Central Valley, Thunderhill was hot and windy that weekend. Jim Burke, co-founder of the Power Racing Series, and Eli Richter, a member of HackPGH, unloaded a vehicle from the back of their truck by hand. It was, ultimately, a one-man job: the SLAMborghini, as it had been christened, was a matte-black Lamborghini Power Wheels car, outfitted with a set of low-cost sensors to enable basic autonomous capabilities.

The Power Racing Series crew was one of a dozen or so teams that attended Self Racing Cars, an autonomous vehicle race series recently launched by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Joshua Schachter. With no restrictions or qualifications, the event attracted a motley crew of established parts suppliers, startups, investors, and media outlets eager to catch the spectacle. Comma.ai was in attendance, fresh from their press day in Las Vegas, as were autonomous vehicle software developer PolySync, automotive supplier Denso, Chris Anderson’s Right Turn Clyde go-kart, and others. Renovo showed up with its perfectly polished $529,000 electric Coupe, but left the self-drifting Delorean, Marty, at home.

Ahead of the weekend, it was unclear what to expect. Outlets like Jalopnik promised the event would "push driverless cars to their limits." Schachter himself was keen to manage expectations. "I’ll just have an event and see who shows up," Schachter told The Verge in April. "If people showed up with a self-driving jalopy, I’d be thrilled."

Ultimately, the event was part track day and part marketing demo, with well-moneyed types circling the parking lot and eying engineers. But more than anything, the first installment of Self Racing Cars felt like an engineering hackathon.

"WE’RE AS GRASSROOTS AS IT GETS! WE’RE PUNK ROCK RACING."

In that sense, Schachter said, the series harkens back to the birth of motorsports. "When racing started you didn’t just buy a car and start racing it — you had to build a car," he said, standing in front of the wind-swept track. "At its inception, racing was as much about engineering as it was competition."

Burke, of Power Racing, echoed the sentiment. "This event at Thunderhill is incredibly valuable to the autonomous community," he said. "A lot of this technology, you hear it in the news all the time — but there’s still a lot of testing miles." Burke and Richter had other motives, too: they’re trying to launch a national low-cost ($1,000 and less) autonomous Power Wheels series for high schoolers. "We’re here to make the connections to help our series grow," Burke said. "We need someone to help us grant write, or underwrite, or anything. We’re as grassroots as it gets! We’re punk rock racing."

The track days were broken up into 25-minute slots, with each team granted multiple runs to test the mettle of their machines. Faced with a twisting, no-holds-barred track, the vehicles revealed their shortfalls quickly: PolySync’s autonomous braking system malfunctioned, preventing a fully autonomous run; the SLAMborghini could only operate under remote control; and Comma.ai’s new $50,000 GPS unit failed — the team was forced to rely on a program their intern wrote on short order.

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