The Elusive Dream of the Driverless Car

This story was originally published by Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Deep in the Mojave Desert, 60 miles from the city of Barstow, is the Slash X Ranch Cafe, a former ranch where dirt bike riders and ATV adventurers can drink beer and eat burgers with fellow daredevils speeding across the desert. Displayed on a wall alongside trucker caps and taxidermy is a plaque that memorializes the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge, a 142-mile race whose starting point was at Slash X Ranch Cafe. It was the first race in the world without human drivers. Instead, it featured the fever-dream inventions -- robotic motorcycles, monster Humvees -- of a handful of software engineers who were hellbent on creating fully autonomous vehicles and winning the million-dollar prize offered by the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.