Watch high-speed autonomous race cars go head-to-head on the track

The self-driving cars went over 170 mph at the CES race.
 By 
Sasha Lekach
 on 
Watch high-speed autonomous race cars go head-to-head on the track
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The annual CES technology conference closed out at more than 170 mph on Friday with the Indy Autonomous Challenge.

The autonomous race car competition came to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway with five teams from seven universities racing self-driving cars for the first place title and $150,000.

Team PoliMOVE from Politecnico di Milano in Italy and the University of Alabama beat out Team TUM Autonomous Motorsport from the Technische Universität München in Germany in the final head-to-head race.

The race was close with Team TUM spinning out at the end. But TUM couldn't catch up from behind nor keep up with PoliMOVE's record speed of 173 mph.

TUM had won the original race in October at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Like at the October race, every team at CES competed with the same Dallara AV-21 race car outfitted with top-of-the-line sensor equipment including LiDAR from sensor maker Luminar for measuring distance with lasers.

More clips from the race are on Twitch and YouTube.

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Sasha Lekach

Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.


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