PJ Vogt

Oh, right.

You would have to literally gridlock a huge American city so people could put robot cars on it.

Exactly.

So he says, okay, do you know what?

We'll do it in the desert.

We'll do it in the desert outside Las Vegas.

And anyone who wants to can make a team, build a self-driving car, bring it to the desert, and we'll race him.

The driver that DARPA wanted to replace was the American soldier.

DARPA wanted a vehicle that could drive itself down roads that might be filled with hidden explosive devices.

So in this moment, at the tail end of the dot-com boom, DARPA's trying to inspire tech to build something besides another website.

DARPA's Tony Tether announces that the prize for whoever can win its grand challenge will be $1 million.

The rules were very open.

There were little rules, like you couldn't have two vehicles communicating with one another, but you could build any kind of vehicle you wanted.

It could have six wheels, it could be a truck, it could be a motorcycle, it could be a tricycle.

It just couldn't attack other vehicles.

That was ruled out early on.

Oh, was that a concern that people would just like sort of battle bot the thing?

Your autonomous vehicle would have like a little shredder that would take out somebody else's?

Someone asked in the first Q&A at this, they said, can we attack other vehicles?

And they said, no.