The Perfect Line of Code

Are autonomous-vehicle engineers the enemies of driving enthusiasts, or can we share the road and the track?

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There is only one question on the FAQ page for the Self Racing Cars (SRC) website: "Why would I come watch this? It seems boring. I kinda thought the same when I was invited to see the SRC group at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca. Why would I watch that? But the SRC event coincided with the Velocity Invitational, a gathering of vintage race cars that sounded very not boring, so I headed to Monterey to see what line self-driving race cars take in the Corkscrew.

Backward is the answer, at least for the Lexus CT that Point One Navigation brought out. The red hatchback ran the course in reverse-and in Reverse. "Our test driver says it was faster than he was," says Daniel Gruver, director of product for Point One. Well, sure, the camera-rigged CT has eyes in the back of its head and no sense of how wrong it feels to head up Laguna's famous hill taillights-first.