Google and other driverless car makers are in a race to get their machines certified for road use, but a project at Stanford University has already put an autonomous car on a racetrack at high speed in a bid to create safer automatic braking systems.

Professor Christian Gerdes and his mechanical engineering students have been testing their autonomous driving algorithms with Shelley, a custom-rigged Audi TTS, on the three-mile track at Thunderhill Raceway in Willows, California.

The car is capable of hitting speeds of 120 mph, though has predominantly been manoeuvring between 50 to 75 mph. Following iterations on the software, the car is nearly as quick around the track as an expert racer.

These speeds are closest to which most car collisions occur, according to Gerdes. He and his students want to understand how the autonomous car adjusts its throttle, brakes and makes use of all the friction of its tires in different situations to inform the development of automatic collision avoidance software.

"A race car driver can use all of a car's functionality to drive fast," said Gerdes. "We want to access that same functionality to make driving safer."

Gerdes is a professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford, a university with a storied history of producing graduates who have gone on to create world-changing inventions in technology, politics and the arts.