Self-Driving Roborace Car Plants Itself Directly Into the Wall at Race Start

In the words of Mike Tyson, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Apparently, As this applies to Roboracing, that very situation would unfold for the Acronis SIT Autonomous team from Switzerland who were left to figure out what to do when they got punched in the mouth, so to say. It wasn’t long, in fact almost immediately, before the team would be completely set back in their pursuit of perfection.

During the race, the start wouldn’t be pretty for one team as they lurched off of the line during the self-driving car race. Now, apparently, some catastrophic failure unfolded because the car wasn’t ready to stay in between the walls. In fact, it almost immediately veered directly toward one of the walls.

An engineer took to Reddit to describe the wreck, saying “When our car was given permission to drive, the acceleration command went as normal but the steering was locked to the right.” He would then go on to say that the controller was trying to steer it back but couldn’t execute the command due to a steering lock.

Naturally, things like this are sure to come as autonomous vehicles are still relatively new. While they have advertised self-driving cars on a grand scale out on the public roadways, not even the best of the best are able to be driven completely by themselves yet, without human supervision. This project apparently had some sort of a stumble that showed us exactly what might happen if self-driving cars go poorly.

Below, we check out the competition that had to be a headache for the team that was probably preparing for a long time. It always is a bummer to see somebody’s effort go down the drain after we’re sure that a lot of time, money, and patience were invested in making the project come to life. The machine was supposedly not able to be repaired on-site.