The last year has been tricky for electric vehicle startups. After a burst of investment mania in which companies raised billions on the mere promise of battery propulsion, valuations have come back down to earth. One of the loudest thuds has come from Arrival, the closest to what could be called a British electric vehicle champion. Its market value on the Nasdaq has fallen from $15bn (£11.6bn) in March 2021, when it first completed a merger with a listed cash shell, to about $1.75bn. Almost all its startup rivals have suffered similar plunges, but Arrival is arguably a special case.

The Argentinian summer Sun beat down on the Buenos Aires city circuit as the cars approached the penultimate turn. It was February 18, 2017, the Saturday of Formula E's South American weekend, and two cars jostled for first place. The second car, though, was being too aggressive. Nearing the corner's apex, the vehicle misjudged its position and speed. The vehicle slammed into the blue safety walls surrounding the track. As the wreckage crumpled to a stop, a detached wheel rolled freely across the hot asphalt. The scene was eerie: though the marshals were alerted to the smash, the usual scramble to rush paramedics to the scene didn't happen.

There's nothing like a throw-down to push new technologies out to the masses. A team of high-tech gearheads is applying that age-old adage to self-driving cars, with plans to launch a new motorsport that will pit robotic cars head-to-head on long, winding racetracks. Roborace--which refers both to the sport and its organizer--wants to create an autonomous version of Formula 1 racing, where the superstars are computer programmers whose code unleashes the speed, precision and efficiency needed to take the checkered flag. A key by-product of those victories: innovations that accelerate the path of driverless passenger cars to market. Roborace's plan to be the first championship for autonomous cars has a lot going for it, although also plenty of speed bumps to negotiate.

Roborace, the firm hoping to kick-start the future of driverless racing, has released incredible footage taken inside one of its self-driving vehicles while in action. The cockpit footage was taken during the first full-speed, self-driven lap of the Formula E track in Berlin earlier this month. The car is seen hitting speeds of 124mph (200 km/h), and avoids colliding with the track walls. The Robocar weighs almost 1,000 kilograms (2,200 lbs), and measures 4.8 metres long (15.7 ft) and two metres wide (6.5 ft). Four motors, each with 300kW of power and a 540kW battery, allow the car to reach dizzying speeds of over 320kph (200mph).

In Paris on May 20, a sleek, streamlined vehicle colored black, white and fluorescent yellow moved slowly around a race course on a blocked-off road. The futuristic vehicle looked like a winged torpedo and had a periscope-like camera-equipped object protruding from the rear of its body. The vehicle looked similar to a Formula One racing car, except that it was electric, and had no driver's seat. Logos saying "Roborace" festooned its body. The vehicle was operated not by a human driver but by artificial intelligence. Teams participating in driverless robot racing events use the electric car, which can travel at speeds of up to 320kph.

Roborace, the firm hoping to kick-start the future of driverless racing, has demonstrated its electric, 200-mile-per-hour (320km/h) self-driving car on a public track for the first time. The futuristic vehicle completed a lap of the Paris ePrix circuit ahead of the city's 2017 Formula E race, which took place on Saturday. The demonstration saw the car complete 14 turns of the almost 2 kilometre (1.2 mile) track while driven entirely by AI and sensors. The Robocar weighs almost 1,000 kilograms (2,200 lbs), and measures 4.8 metres long (15.7 ft) and two metres wide (6.5 ft). Four motors, each with 300kW of power and a 540kW battery, allow the car to reach dizzying speeds of over 320kph (200mph).

The lights dimmed and a hush fell over the crowd. The last hour had been building to this. Denis Sverdlov, CEO of Roborace, and Daniel Simon, chief design officer, took a step back as some knee-high panels were taken away and a silky cloth was lifted, revealing a mechanical monster underneath. More than a year after the project's announcement, the pair had finally revealed their first production-grade Robocar: a fully electric, driverless race car built from the ground up for a new breed of motorsport. One where the heroes are programmers, concocting the smartest and most competitive AI drivers. The Robocar is an imposing sight.

It's rare that software engineers are lauded as the heroes of anything, but Roborace CEO Denis Sverdlov wants to change that. Sverdlov, formerly CEO of Russian mobile operator Yota, set up Roborace last year with the goal of organizing street races that will pit self-driving cars against one another. "In the racing environment engineers are usually in the background. Here the software engineers are the heroes," he said at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday. Designing and building high-performance race cars is horrendously expensive, but Sverdlov wants Roborace to be an intellectual competition, not a financial one.

The world of car racing is set to get a futuristic update with the unveiling of the world's first driverless electric race car. Roborace revealed the stunning vehicle, dubbed'Robocar' today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Two of the Robocars will go head to head in a race later this year, setting up the potential for a race series dedicated to driverless cars. Roborace revealed the stunning vehicle, dubbed'Robocar' today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona The Robocar weighs 975 kilograms, and measures 4.8 metres long and two metres wide. Four motors, each with 300kW and a 540kW battery allow the car to reach dizzy speeds of over 320kph (200mph).

But while both firms will be hoping to take the'car of the future' title, that seemingly belongs to this beast of a vehicle from Roborace. Called Robocar, the racer was unveiled at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, by Denis Sverdlov, CEO of Roborace and Charge, and Daniel Simon, the car's designer. Sverdlov emphasised that the development of autonomous racing vehicles was a way to create "an emotional connection to driverless cars and bring humans and robots closer together to define our future." Robocar was developed in a little under a year but has an array of impressive technological features that take advantage of the Nvidia's Drive PX2 brain - the open AI car computing platform capable of 24 trillion AI operations per second. The car is powered by five LiDAR sensors; 18 ultrasonic sensors; six AI cameras and GNSS positioning, and it reaches speeds of 199mph (320kph).