Autonomous Roborace car immediately slams into wall

Building autonomous automobiles is a challenging proposition. When autonomous vehicles operate on public roads, there is so much going on that it's hard to make them safe and competent. You might think building an autonomous car to race on a track that's always the same would be a much easier proposition.

An autonomous racing series called Roborace has been around for a while, and some of the cars are much more successful than others. It's very difficult to build a car able to navigate a race track at high speeds accurately. One Roborace team recently had what can only be described as the very worst outing possible.

You might think crashing your racecar at the very first turn would be the worst outcome possible. You would be wrong. Race team SIT Acronis Autonomous had their racing car on the starting grid for the Season Beta 1.1 race, which appears to be a testing event as the car was alone on the track.

When the car gets the green flag to hit the track, it immediately takes a hard right turn and smashes into the wall. It crashed before getting out of the starting grid. What exactly caused the racing car to immediately smash into the wall is unknown at this time. The admittedly hilarious incident had to be embarrassing for the race team.

That said, the SIT racing car wasn't the only one to have difficulties during the weekend. Autonomous Racing Graz fielded a car that had positioning issues leading it to abandon the race. We hate to see a cool racing car slammed into a wall, but it doesn't appear that the damage was extreme, and the car can likely be repaired. Check out the video above to see the accident for yourself.