---
title: "First Live Roborace Between Two Self-Driving Race Cars Ends in Crash"
description: "And it wasn't because of the dog that strayed onto the course mid-race."
date: "2017-02-22"
modified: "2017-02-22"
authors:
  - name: "Christian Gilbertsen"
    job_title: "Native Projects Editor"
    link: "https://www.thedrive.com/authors/christian-gilbertsen"
url: "https://www.thedrive.com/accelerator/7815/first-live-roborace-between-two-self-driving-race-cars-ends-in-crash"
categories:
  - "News"
  - "Racing"
tags:
  - "buenos aires"
  - "Crash"
  - "devbot"
  - "dog"
  - "roborace"
---

# First Live Roborace Between Two Self-Driving Race Cars Ends in Crash

![](<https://www.thedrive.com/wp-content/uploads/images-by-url-td/content/2017/02/ba_devbot3_4k.jpg>)
*\<em\>www.thedrive.com</em>*

Last weekend, Buenos Aires hosted the first-ever driverless race between [two electric race cars ](<https://electrek.co/2017/02/18/self-driving-car-race-crash-buenos-aires-formula-e-eprix/>)in front of a live audience...which, perhaps unsurprisingly, ended in a crash.

Taking place on the Puerto Madero street circuit in Buenos Aires—a Formula E racetrack—Roborace's DevBots chased each other around for 20 fully autonomous laps and reached speeds of nearly 115 mph. For reference, Formula E cars can only get to 150 mph, according to [*The Verge*](<https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/21/14669028/roborace-race-video-self-driving-cars-crash>).

Mid-race, a dog somehow found its way onto the track, and one of the DevBots successfully swerved to avoiding hitting it. Sadly, the other DevBot later ended up slamming into a barrier, presumably from overcooking a corner. Roborace tweeted, "Devbot 2 while pushing the boundaries of AI had a racing incident on track, leaving Devbot 1 to win."

The self-driving race car program is still undergoing constant development, so a small crash is to be expected once in a while—even if the DevBots' computing power comes from NVIDIA.

Below, you can see that the DevBots appear to be taking the corners quite gingerly, but apparently their straight-line speed was impressive. Obviously, no one was injured in the crash, which Roborace quickly pointed out with an added winky emoji on [Twitter](<https://twitter.com/roborace/status/833017579685961737>).

https://twitter.com/_/status/833000988311244800

https://twitter.com/_/status/833030665608249349

https://twitter.com/_/status/833003063480815617

### Author social links  
[Instagram](<https://instagram.com/chrgilbert>)