Try Not To Get Creeped Out By This Roborace Development Car's Autonomous Lap

Over 18 months on from the initial announcement about the series, we’re still not sure how to feel when it comes to Roborace. The idea of a driverless racing series is arguably besides the entire point of motorsport, but then again, we can’t help but be curious about how the proposed Formula E support series will shape up.

This week, we’ve been given a little taster, thanks to this footage depicting a moderately unsettling autonomous lap of the Berlin E-Prix track undertaken by ‘DevBot’. It’s a development car for the series, and if you’re wondering why it has a steering wheel, that’s because it’s a long way from the finished article.

Devbot has same basic guts that’ll be used for the futuristic-looking Roborace cars, all stuffed inside a bastardised Ginetta LMP3 car. It’s designed so it can be driven by humans, “allowing teams to fully understand how the car thinks and feels on a racetrack alongside the comprehensive real-time data,” Roborace organisers said last year.

In Berlin, DevBot managed to get within eight per cent of the time managed with a human driving. So, the squishy bit behind the wheel isn’t irrelevant just yet, then…