Photo: Kinetik / Roborace / Daniel Simon
***
I’m in transit all day today, so instead of a normal post, here’s a glimpse of the future of racing. “Roborace” will be the latest innovation to the car racing world since the introduction of Formula E, the all-electric series that’s been running since 2014.
Part of the reason I’m excited about Roborace is because the very reason for these races — Formula 1 included — is because they serve as the high-cost testbed platforms for new technologies that, like the space program, eventually find their way into our day-to-day technology. Roborace will be the place for testing the cutting edge of self-driving cars.
The other part of the reason is because they look SO. DAMN. COOL. They got Daniel Simon, the guy responsible for the lightcycles in Tron: Legacy, to design the cars. And now we know what they’ll look like.
The cars will be built by Kinetik and have brains made by NVIDIA. You can learn more over at roborace.com.
The future looks good.
***
Richard Ford Burley is a human, writer, and doctoral candidate at Boston College, as well as an editor at Ledger, the first academic journal devoted to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In his spare time he writes about science, skepticism, feminism, and futurism here at This Week In Tomorrow.