Dean Takahashi (left) interviews Laszlo Kishonti of AImotive and Rod Chong of Slightly Mad Studios at GamesBeat Summit 2017.
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The crossover between car simulations and autonomous vehicles

Artificial intelligence is advancing fast and it is leading to strange bedfellows. One case is the interplay between AImotive, a maker of self-driving car software for real-world autonomous cars, and Slightly Mad Studios, the London-based maker of the Project Cars video game and the upcoming Project Cars 2.

AImotive found that it needed to test its self-driving car software in cars on the road, but that wasn’t really easy to do, given regulatory restrictions on where such cars can be driven. So the company turned to a video game, Project Cars, and used it to test whether its software was good at recognizing obstacles that a car needed to avoid, like bumps or pedestrians.

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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.