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).
Dive into the brain of the A2RL’s Autonomous Vehicles
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.
