DARPA Grand Challenge (2007)

[2] Discovery's Science channel followed a few of the teams and covered the Urban Challenge in its Robocars Archived 2008-07-30 at the Wayback Machine series.

[3] The $2 million winner was Tartan Racing, a collaborative effort by Carnegie Mellon University and General Motors Corporation, with their vehicle "Boss", a heavily modified Chevrolet Tahoe.

The second-place finisher earning the $1 million prize was the Stanford Racing Team with their entry "Junior", a 2006 Volkswagen Passat.

Coming in third place was team Victor Tango from Virginia Tech winning the $500,000 prize with their 2005 Ford Escape hybrid, "Odin".

Other than previous autonomous vehicle efforts that focused on structured situations such as highway driving with little interaction between the vehicles, this competition operated in a more cluttered urban environment and required the cars to perform sophisticated interactions with each other, such as maintaining precedence at a 4-way stop intersection.

Well-coordinated fully automatic driving will be much more efficient, with reduction in traffic jams and road accidents, which cost trillions per year in the US alone.

On August 9, 2007, after completing the site visits, DARPA announced[7] the 36 semi-finalists selected to participate in the Urban Challenge National Qualification Event (NQE) that took place October 26–31, 2007.

[12] Six autonomous vehicle teams finished the event; Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Virginia Tech, Ben Franklin Racing, MIT, and Cornell.

On November 4, CMU's Boss was named the winner, followed by Stanford's Junior, then Virginia Tech's Odin, and MIT's Talos.

Pulled after a collision head on in traffic circle, while turning right correctly but being damaged by the wrong way driving opponent.