Would You Watch Driver-less Racing?

"MasterMario - Keeper of the V8s" (mastermario) 12/21/2013 at 21:46 • Filed to: None

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As I was reading another article about the numerous driver-less vehicles being developed I thought about whether this would ever make it into racing. Seeing as a race track would not have people, dogs, construction, poorly maintained/damaged roads, or random objects in the road, technically it would actually be much easier to develop a self driving race car. I know I might get some flak for this since most of us on this site wouldn't be able to bear the thought of a auto race with out a driver, but hear me out.

I think it would bring a whole new dynamic to auto racing that would be very cool and very interesting. First off, the "driver", being a computer, would create a whole new dynamic to the championship and racing league. No longer would it be mainly about the driver (which every racing league pretty much is, whether it's one driver or a team of drivers). Instead the focus would be on the team: the engineers, mechanics, strategists, and technicians who develop the software, the car, and the race strategy. You wouldn't have as much (no way could I imagine there ever being none) drama or personalities overshadowing the cars and races themselves (although I am sure we all enjoy that stuff to a certain extent).

Secondly, with a driver-less car you would have a whole new way to think about how to design a race car. No longer would the vehicle's design need to be restrained by needing to fit a human body inside and keep that person alive in the event of a crash. Just imagine the crazy designs you would see, especially in the beginning years of such a league. I'd think the league would have certain performance, size, and weight criteria, but I would hope they would be fairly general and allow a lot of variation and creativity between the teams.

Lastly, what could be the most interesting part (or end up being the most boring), would be how the computer "drivers" interact while on the track. Watching many different cars compete with different logic based on what kind of race strategy the team wants to use would be very interesting. Imagine even two cars from the same team, they could program one to race super aggressively and have the other race more conservatively, and possibly even change that logic mid-race. How would the computer react when racing against other cars that it has no communication with? I think you might see quite a few wrecks in this kind of racing, especially in the early years. I think this could be the most interesting part of this type of racing, you literally have logic driving these cars.

In my brief google search I only found a few things about this sort of thing, mostly related to the guy in the link below. I am sure there is more out there that I haven't found, but this sort of thing seems to be pretty low key so far. I'd encourage you to watch the video, it's extremely interesting and gives insight not only to autonomous vehicles but to human drivers as well.

http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_ge…

So what do you think, would you watch driver-less racing?