The first autonomous car race (27 April 2024) is a really important historic event that appears to have been missed by the main media. We expect the race will birth a fascinating new "television sport" with a fan-base of highly-educated technophiles drawn by the technological progress towards human capability in full view.
Eight teams will use identical Dallara Super Formula SF23 cars with the same autonomous technology stack, so like with any single marque race series, it's entirely down to the driver. This is a Grand Prix for software engineers. Each team can only utilize its coding skills, AI algorithms, and machine learning software expertise to teach the cars how to drive ... fast. The event will also see former Red Bull F1 driver Daniil Kvyat run against one of the autonomous cars in a non-autonomous Dallara SF23, and during testing Kvyat was much faster, but the gap was closing.
The eight teams will compete for a prize purse of US$ 2.25 million:
- Code19 Racing (one of the first independent autonomous racing entities from the USA)
- Constructor University (based in Germany and Switzerland)
- Fly Eagle (representing Beijing Institute of Technology from China and Khalifa University from the UAE)
- HUMDA Lab (a member of the Széchenyi István University Group from Hungary)
- KINETIZ (a collaboration between Singapore Nanyang Technological University and Kintsugi based in the UAE)
- PoliMOVE (representing Politecnico di Milano from Italy)
- UNIMORE (also from Italy - University of Modena and Reggio Emilia)
- Technical University of Munich - TUM (from Germany).
Why we think this is important
The Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League (A2RL) is thinking big. In addition to the racing of autonomous cars, the intention is to establish a series of high-profile autonomous races for drones and dune buggies.
Abu Dhabi has the money to invest in the creation of a new extreme sport that will be a valuable commodity in its own right, but the economic investment will reap rewards in many ways. The creation of the A2RL will raise the standard of education of Abu Dhabi’s youth to the very bleeding edge of understanding by creating the associations between its tertiary institutions and the best in the world.
Abu Dhabi has already seen what a globally focussed sport can do for a country’s economy as it hosts one of the jewels of the Formula One Season each year at the purpose-built Yas Marina Circuit.
The inaugural A2RL race will offer the entire world a clear view into the practical applications of AI, and the intention appears to be to bring together the virtual and real-life experiences so we’re likely to see a new and interesting platforms that can offer different ways of becoming involved with the experience - all of them digital and hence location-agnostic for the audience, and all of them connecting Abu Dhabi to the rest of the world.
In terms of historical context, I personally think the first event of the A2RL will one day be of equal status to the world’s first car race (1894 Paris – Rouen), the 1996 chess match between IBM’s Deep Blue computer and world chess champion Garry Kasparov and the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge for autonomous ground vehicles.
The automobile is evolving and we are currently seeing the rapid electrification of the automotive carpark. China appears to be the first country to have passed the tipping point – from the beginning of this month - April 2024 - more than half of all Chinese car sales are now electric or PHEV.
For car manufacturers, differentiating your EV from those of other manufacturers will be a lot harder without an Internal Combustion engine to give it some character. Over the next decade, the world will make the switch to electric vehicles at the same time as a raft of technologies reach maturity at the same time: artificial intelligence, high speed wireless networking, massive computing power and … autonomous driving capabilities.
Our myopic view of the world seems to forget how recently the automobile was introduced.
For the 130 years since the first car race, more people have perished each year than the year prior … every year. Only fabulously wealthy eccentrics could afford an automobile in 1894, but there will be 1.5 billion cars on the world’s roads later this year. Those 1.5 billion cars are responsible for the 1.35 million humans killed on roadways around the world each year. More people now die in crashes than from HIV/AIDS.
If road trauma hasn’t impacted you yet, you are lucky. That’s 3,700 people killed per day on public roads. 154 people die every hour from road trauma, plus all the life-changing injuries and we seem to have just accepted this as the cost of doing business. As the CDC wrote in a report recently, “Travel made possible by motor vehicles supports economic and social development in many countries. Yet each year, vehicles are involved in crashes that are responsible for millions of deaths and injuries.”
Autonomous vehicles are much safer than those driven by humans already, and given the cost of the sensors required to turn an electric vehicle into an autonomous vehicle is small compared to the amenity it provides. Within a few decades, all cars will have autonomous capabilities – this will become a highly relevant sport 50 years from now, if not much sooner.
If you aren't in Abu Dhabi, you can catch the excitement of Race Day on the A2RL’s official YouTube and Twitch channels, motorsport.tv and the A2RL app.
It won't be long before most cars on public roads will have autonomous capabilities. We expect a bright future for this sport for techies.
