PJ Vogt

The second race is as successful as the first race is disastrous.

Nearly every entrant in the second race would go further than Sandstorm had in the first.

Multiple vehicles would finish the course.

The real question was who would do it fastest.

And so at what point was it clear to you that you were going to win?

Well, once we passed the front running team, we kind of saw the vehicle descend into what was the hardest part of the race course, a very, very treachery mountain pass.

And we saw at a distance a dust cloud.

We saw a helicopter.

We saw little features that made us believe, wow, there's something happening that's magical.

And this dust cloud then all of a sudden turned bluish because the car was blue and came closer.

And then it came first to the finish line.

It was unbelievably magical.

At the end of the doc, over some criminally corny piano music, Sebastian Thrun gives his post-race interview.

He's dressed a lot like a race car driver, watching You Could Forget He Wasn't In The Car.

It was just amazing to see this community of people.

a made-for-TV kumbaya moment, still years before the race to build driverless cars would enter its cutthroat phase.

What would happen next is that a small band of lunatics would take driverless cars out of the desert, start secretly driving them on public roads in the state of California.

They would do this at the behest of a man who had been observing from the stands that day, disguised in a hat and sunglasses, who'd watched the challenge while his mind spun.

That's after a short break.

I'm Stephen Dubner, and you are listening to a special episode of the podcast Search Engine here on Freakonomics Radio.