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Comment by mattferderer | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, what's the point of a driver in something like this besides to have a human in the vehicle adding weight? Are they doing much?

Serious & maybe very ignorant question.

- Edit - For clarification, my reason for asking was due to this occurring in less than 1 second. I don't understand what the driver does as I'm assuming they have no gears to shift or turns to make.

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I’d hazard you can’t get a world record without a human being in the car?

I’m no mechanical engineer, but I could definitely make something without a human inside of it go from 0-100 in less than a second.

Definitely could do it in sub 0.2 seconds quite easily.

A bullet will do 0-60mph in 20ms.

Raises the stakes, provides a degree of accountability.

Otherwise it’s just a missle with a required degree of ground contact, no?

Fair question. But ultimately human sports are about humans. It’s just less exciting to watch robots compete (though I like it).

I assume it's because racing, as a sport, is a lot less interesting without the variable of a human with particular skills operating the vehicle. I doubt crowds would be as interested in watching cars race on autopilot, though it'd still be kind of cool, I guess.

> racing, as a sport, is a lot less interesting without the variable of a human with particular skills operating the vehicle.

If full self-driving gets much better, I think it could be fun to see this happen. It would be like a hackathon with teams swapping out and improving on strategies through laps. The qualifiers could happen on electric miniatures then the final round would get a full car to race on a track.

I think a fully automated battlebots arena might be more fun but I'd still watch track racing.

The racing formula this is from, Formula Student, actually has a driverless competition as part of it. It's pretty fun, but also harder than one would think, still.

That actually does sound pretty fun haha

AMZ's cars are also capable of autonomous driving (they were actually one of the top teams in the autonomous categories for the last couple of years).

I assume it's just a requirement for this Guiness record category, or they didn't want to bother with all the software.

Guinness world records are well defined and some are kinda arbitrary. In some sense, I'm sure the driver is there to satisfy the rules of the world record. In another sense, I'm sure they're there to have a load of fun, too.

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