Kinetiz wins Europe's first multi-car driverless race at Imola

Kinetiz, a UAE-based team, took the win in a 12-lap contest at Imola that organizers billed as Europe's first multi-car race between fully autonomous cars, Euronews reported. Five teams from Germany, Italy and the UAE, all racing under the Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League (A2RL), sent identical Dallara SF23 single-seaters onto the historic Formula 1 circuit with nobody behind the wheel.

There is no wheel to be behind. "The cars use cameras, radar and lidar sensors to perceive their surroundings, while an onboard computer controls the car," the report notes. The race is decided by software.

A2RL, founded in 2023 and based in Abu Dhabi, has pitched its events as a stress test for autonomy in a place where a mistake costs a fender rather than a life. Alexander Winkler, the league's head of sporting, said it "addresses one of the biggest challenges in developing autonomous vehicles, which is testing risky scenarios in a controlled environment, at high speeds."

The engineering bar is unusually high. "To me, as a professor, this is probably one of the most difficult engineering problems you have today," said Marko Bertogna of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. Sascha Buettner, team lead for the Technical University of Munich entry, was blunter about race day: "When the race starts, it's hands off... hoping to be proud. But, of course, that can go wrong."

For ASPIRE, the Abu Dhabi organization behind A2RL, the value is the competitive pressure the format puts on the code. "The teams that come here are all about winning. They are scientists... what they want is to win," said its CEO, Stephane Timpano.