Three robotic cars have crossed the DARPA Urban Challenge finish line in the allotted time. The three self-driving vehicles are Stanford's robotic VW Passat, Virginia Tech's modified Ford Escape Hybrid, and Carnegie Mellon's autonomous Chevrolet Tahoe. They are in the running for a $2 million first prize and a $1 million second prize. The third place gets half a million.

While Stanford University's robot car Junior crossed the finish line first, it's still unknown what the final rankings will be. This is due to the fact that not all three cars left at the same time and they will also be thoroughly examined for compliance with basic traffic rules.

The competition was staged at an unused military based in Victorville, a California town some 75 miles northeast of Los Angeles, where the unmanned vehicles had to make their way through a sixty-mile course in a fake urban environment. Forty other cars, driven by people, simulated city traffic.

During the competition, Team Cornell's Skynet stopped before scraping the concrete K-rail bordering the course after turning too sharply. MIT's vehicle caught up to it and eventually the two vehicles collided because Skynet decided to move again just when the other car was passing by. Damage was minor and both vehicles were put back in the race.

"There's more computing power in the back than most companies have," MIT team leader Paul Barrett told AFP about their modified Land Rover. "It's like all the PCs in your company".

The decision to develop autonomous vehicles was taken by the U.S. Congress through Section 220 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2001, Public Law 106-398, which mandated that "It shall be a goal of the Armed Forces to achieve the fielding of unmanned, remotely controlled technology such that… by 2015, one-third of the operational ground combat vehicles are unmanned."

Subsequently, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched the Urban Challenge program in support of this Congressional mandate to make sure that every "dull, dirty, or dangerous" task that can be carried out using a machine instead of a human will be so in the near future.