Aric Sleeper here, thinking about the past and future of transportation after checking out the Indy Autonomous Challenge at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca on Thursday, Sept. 3.
The challenge brings together university students from a slew of academic institutions and the private sector to ultimately advance autonomous vehicle technology and build a workforce for the future, with the Thursday race bringing together teams from Caltech, UC Berkeley, Purdue University, Indiana University, Michigan State University, Auburn University, University of Virginia, University of Modena and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
“This is a research and development competition,” says Paul Mitchell, founder and CEO of the Indy Autonomous Challenge. “The teams develop software to pilot these fully autonomous IndyCars. Our organization is based in Indiana and we built 10 of these autonomous racecars and we’ve been running them now for more than five years.”
Mitchell explained that the self-governing vehicles have historically run alone on oval tracks and they were performing a “passing competition" on the course at Laguna Seca for the first time.
“It’s very exciting,” Mitchell says. “It’s a new form of motorsport but the real goal of this is to advance the technology of autonomous cars—to see how they can handle really challenging driving situations. If you can run a racecar at 170 miles per hour and make passes, you can probably run an autonomous car at 180 miles per hour.”
The event was attended by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology, Seval Oz, who has a long track record of working with autonomous vehicles, having served as Senior Business Development and Global Partnerships Lead at Google [X]’s Self-Driving Car Program, which ultimately became Waymo.
“I’m thrilled to be a part of this competition and see this innovative technology actually be tested on the track,” Oz says. “We haven’t had scale deployment of automated vehicle technology on our roads and we need to see that. So I am hoping with this administration, we will move that needle. And today is a great opportunity where we are able to talk with industry and university program directors to be able to establish a path forward so that we as the U.S. Department of Transportation can help guide this effort.”
Oz explained that she and others in the Trump Administration believe we are living in “a golden age of transportation” and mentioned that she was recently in Shreveport, Louisiana, where the local transportation agency inaugurated its first autonomous bus.
“It’s not just autonomous as it relates to vehicles, passenger or commercial, it’s also all different types of modes: rail, transit, aviation and maritime,” Oz says. “It’s exciting that the Department of Transportation’s golden age, as we describe it, is really pushing forward and raising the level on all of these capabilities.”
Although excited about the potential of autonomous vehicle technology, Oz says she still believes in the “freedom to drive,” and doesn’t see human driving going away entirely in the future, nor would she want it to, which is a sentiment shared by Laguna Seca President and General Manager Mel Harder.
“I don’t see this as a replacement for motorsports racing but I am excited to see what the future brings,” Harder says.