Launching bot number seven. Dad strobes on, audible goes out, and Dad is off and running at the DARPA Grand Challenge.

Way back in 2004, I covered a team that was involved in a very unusual kind of race. This is the announcer at the start line. The DADSTESPORGTILA Grand Challenge. The race was called the DARPA Grand Challenge. Oh yes, DARPA. It's an arm of the U.S. military, but I like to think of it more like that laboratory you always see in James Bond films where they're like inventing crazy stuff, and some of it works and some of

it doesn't. And in DARPA's case, they've produced some amazing things. They were responsible,

for example, for the creation of the internet. Yes, a little thing called the internet you might

have heard of. So in 2004, the grand challenge was a competition that DARPA ran, and they put up

a $1 million prize for anyone who could get a car to drive itself on a course

that was about 140 miles long. The course went through the deserts of California and Nevada.

Autonomous cars were still this really crazy, futuristic idea back then, and DARPA wanted to see

if anybody could figure out how to make one work. So for this magazine story I was

writing, I went out to California a few months before the race to spend time with one of the teams

that was going to compete in the Grand Challenge. Now, I remember that this turned out to be a big

battle between Stanford and Carnegie Mellon. It was kind of constant rivalry. So was it Stanford that

you went to see? No. So yes, there were big research universities involved, but there are also these weird little subsets of dreamers that came out of the woodwork to try to compete in the challenge and win the million dollar prize. And I was with one of these dreamers. So it was this group of guys. They worked together at a tech company. They'd read a story in the newspaper about the Grand Challenge and they were at lunch in the cafeteria in their office, and they said, you know what? I think we could do that. I think we could win the million dollars. I think we could make a car that can drive itself. I remember you guys, like, working out of somebody's garage, where you just, like, in a suburban house in Thousand Oaks,and Oaks and there was the garage and you had like your vehicle in the garage of the house. Exactly. That was the garage. But that was only one part there. There were other garages also where we could put that together in workshops there. That's Reinhold. Okay. My name is Reinhold Beringer. I remember Reinhold's team had moved children's bicycles out of this garage at a team member's house in order to make space for their grand challenge dune buggy, which is this thing that was covered in sensors and servo motors. Did you think you had a chance to win? To be honest, yes, because, okay, participating is one thing, and of course that was very exciting,

but we thought if we do it right, there is a chance from, you know, knowing the technology.

It sounds crazy, but with hindsight, we can trace all of the modern enthusiasm for self-driving cars

and the billions of dollars now being pumped into that field, back to this prize challenge.

But people have been offering prizes for a long time. This idea isn't new. One of the most

famous tech prizes was established by the British government back in 1714. It offered a huge

pot of money to anyone who could solve a problem that was bedeviling the world.

In some ways, that prize succeeded spectacularly.

But it also showed that jump-starting innovation by offering a prize isn't always as straightforward as it seems.

From Slate, I'm Seth Stevenson.

...