A Maserati MC20 Just Drove Itself To Nearly 200mph

The Maserati MC20 is one of the most driver-focused of the current crop of supercars, so it feels a strange choice of car with which to set a speed record that didn’t involve a driver at all.

That’s just what a team of very brainy individuals from the Indy Autonomous Challenge and the Politecnico di Milano have done, though, because an MC20 has just set a new world speed record for a driverless car.

Obviously, you need a very big space to do this, which is why the run took place on the 2.84-mile runway at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, once used to land the Space Shuttle as it came rocketing back down to earth.

The Shuttle would have been going around 215mph when it landed, and the driverless Maser didn’t get too far off that, hitting a top speed of 197.7mph thanks to its 3.0-litre twin-turbo 621bhp V6. The MC20 Coupe’s quoted top speed, by the way, is 202mph.

All this was done without anyone on board to oversee things, with the driving handled by an AI software developed by the Politecnico di Milano. We’re not entirely sure how advanced a piece of software really needs to be to simply drive a car in a straight line, but this is all well above our pay grade.

At any rate, the Nomex-wearing equivalent of HAL 9000 managed to keep the MC20 on the straight and narrow en route to the record, which supersedes the one of 192.8mph set by the same team, and at the same venue, three years ago with a Dallara AV-21 autonomous open-wheel racer.

All this wasn’t just done for bragging rights. Paul Mitchell, Indy Autonomous Challenge CEO, said: “These world speed records are much more than just a showcase of future technology; we are pushing AI-driver software and robotics hardware to the absolute edge. Doing so with a streetcar is helping transition the learnings of autonomous racing to enable safe, secure, sustainable, high-speed autonomous mobility on highways”

All well and good, and very noble goals, then, but frankly, if we were presented with an MC20 and an empty 2.8-mile runway, we’d still rather do the driving ourselves.