This year's Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach will take a break from ALMS and Champ Car racing to pit three of last year's DARPA Urban Challenge entrants against each other to see which autonomous vehicle can lap the circuit the fastest.
We've brought you coverage before on the DARPA Urban Challenge. Essentially, the event is an autonomous vehicle competition that pitted various universities and automakers against each other in the name of creating a vehicle to navigate itself through a realistic urban environment the fastest, safest, and most accurately.
The winner of last year's competition was Boss, a 2007 Chevrolet Tahoe that was donated to Carnegie Mellon University students by GM for transformation into an autonomous SUV. At Long Beach, Boss will be joining Junion (a 2006 VW Passat and DARPA runner up) and Ben (a Toyota Prius that finished sixth).
For those who have never seen an autonomous vehicle run, it's an eerie thing to witness. We'll be at the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach again this year to bring you more information on the ALMS and Champ Car racing events, as well as the DARPA autonomous race. Stay tuned, you won't want to miss it.
Source: LBGP