Chris Gerdes, a boyish and bespectacled Stanford engineering professor and his students have programmed their Audi race car, Shelly, to flawlessly make the 153 turns on the 12.4 miles of the Pikes Peak trail in Colorado -- with no one at the wheel.
“People often say the technology is solved, but I don’t quite believe that. There’s a lot of context, a lot of subtle, but important things yet to be solved. (...) It’s important to think about not just how these cars will drive themselves, but what’s the experience of being in them and how do they interact. The technology and the human really should be inseparable."