There’s more to self-driving cars than just Panda-looking blobs and radar-equipped mules cruising around. Here’s a side to that scene that’s way more underground and DIY that you’d expect.


The last place you might think to find a bunch of Silicon Valley tech gurus would be in a dingy warehouse somewhere in Oakland, CA. But once a month they meet up to race their own personal autonomous RC cars to the test. Although their desire to win is palpable, it still acts as a fantastic forum for these tech wizards to get input and show off what they’ve built.



The group’s meetup page states “The overall aim of this group and these meetups is to make and race pro-level autonomous cars on a budget. That means that they’re smaller than regular cars (from go-kart size, down to 1/16th scale) and can be used indoors.”


But that shouldn’t stop people from potentially bringing full-size autonomous cars to the warehouse, however they say that they “may not always have space to run them in driverless mode.”



We caught up with their founder, Chris Anderson, as well as some of the other members to get a little more information about the group. Watch the full video above to see what drives their interest and their cars.