The Roborace project focuses on a self-driving race car.
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How Roborace plans to improve autonomous cars through racing

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 6 min

When I showed up at the Nvidia booth at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), there wasn’t much to see. There was a green race car in the middle and a bunch of people standing around it. I took pictures of the car and was about to move on, but then, I noticed there was no cockpit on the car. I was looking at a Roborace vehicle.

Daniel Simon, the creator of sci-fi cars in Tron: Legacy, designed the green vehicle as the first driverless electric racing car. It weighs 2,204 pounds and is about 15.7 feet long. It has four motors and one big battery, and it can go more than 200 miles per hour. It also has an Nvidia Drive PX2 brain, capable of up to 24 trillion AI operations per second. Soon, it will be upgraded to Xavier, Nvidia’s new AI chip with 9 billion transistors.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.