The sun was barely above the horizon on March 13, 2004, but the Slash X saloon bar, in the middle of the Mojave Desert, was already thronging with people.
The bar is on the outskirts of Barstow, a California town between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. It’s a place popular with cowboys and off-roaders, but on that spring day it had drawn the attention of another kind of crowd. A makeshift stadium that had been built was packed with engineers, excited spectators and foolhardy petrol heads who all shared a similar dream: to be the first people on Earth to witness a driverless car win a race.
The race had been organized by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA (nicknamed the Pentagon’s “mad science” division). The agency had been interested in unmanned vehicles for a while, and with good reason: Roadside bombs and targeted attacks on military vehicles were a major cause of death on the battlefield. Earlier that year, DARPA had announced its intention to make one-third of U.S. ground military forces vehicles autonomous by 2015.
Up to that point, progress had been slow and expensive. DARPA had spent around half a billion dollars over two decades funding research at universities and companies in the hope of achieving its ambition. But then came an ingenious idea: Why not create a competition? The agency would invite anyone in the country to design their own driverless car and race them against each other on a long-distance track, with a prize of $1 million for the winner. It would be a quick and cheap way to give DARPA a head start in pursuing its goal.
On the morning of the 132-mile race, a ramshackle lineup of cars gathered at Slash X, along with a few thousand spectators. Things didn’t quite go as planned. One car flipped upside down in the starting area and had to be withdrawn. A self-driving motorbike barely cleared the start line before it rolled onto its side and was declared out of the race. One car hit a concrete wall 50 yards in. Another got tangled in a barbwire fence. The scene around the saloon bar began to look like a robot graveyard.
