The sun was barely above the horizon on March 13, 2004, but the Slash X saloon bar, in the middle of the Mojave Desert, was already thronging with people. The bar is on the outskirts of Barstow, a California town between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. It's a place popular with cowboys and off-roaders, but on that spring day it had drawn the attention of another kind of crowd. A makeshift stadium that had been built was packed with engineers, excited spectators and foolhardy petrol heads who all shared a similar dream: to be the first people on Earth to witness a driverless car win a race.
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