On November 3, 2007, a modified Chevrolet Tahoe named Boss, built by Tartan Racing - a team led by Carnegie Mellon University with General Motors - won the DARPA Urban Challenge and its $2 million prize. The competition ran from October 26 to November 3, 2007 at the former George Air Force Base in Victorville, California. Stanford Racing’s Junior took second place and $1 million; Virginia Tech’s Victor Tango entry Odin took third and $500,000.
The Urban Challenge raised the bar from the open-desert format of the 2004 and 2005 Grand Challenges. According to Carnegie Mellon’s announcement, vehicles “were required to operate entirely autonomously, without human intervention,” while obeying California traffic laws and performing maneuvers such as “merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles and avoiding obstacles.” The field of 11 finalists had been selected from 35 semifinalists, themselves drawn from an original pool of 89 competitors.
Where the 2005 desert course tested a car’s ability to follow a route and dodge obstacles, the 2007 event tested something closer to ordinary driving: sharing a road with other moving vehicles, yielding, and obeying the rules of the road. Many of the engineers who built Boss and Junior went on to lead self-driving programs in industry, making the Urban Challenge a direct ancestor of the modern robotaxi.