Two driverless cars crashed at 155 mph. The engineers wanted that to happen.

Two of five cars finished the Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League's first European race at Imola on September 5, and that result is what the league came to collect. A2RL runs as a public lab for autonomous-vehicle failure. The cars that didn't finish, including the two that collided at Rivazza at race speed, are the data.

A2RL's September 7 release confirms the September 5 race, with Kinetiz first and Constructor Racing second. WIRED Middle East reports TUM withdrew on the formation lap for technical reasons; the Unimore–PoliMOVE collision at Rivazza was the headline. Unimore told WIRED its car, Gianna, lost lidar and radar and stopped for safety because GPS alone was insufficient for racing-grade localization. PoliMOVE said Eva detected the slowing competitor, braked at roughly 1 g, and asserted the collision had become physically unavoidable about 1.5 seconds out. That causal account is the team's, not an independent reconstruction; vehicle data remain inside the competition.

A2RL reported PoliMOVE's Eva hit a race top speed of 252.3 km/h, the figure behind the "155 mph" headlines; that is race speed, not impact speed. A2RL held nine days of physical testing at Imola after two seasons at Yas Marina, including sessions in rain and hail, on one of motorsport's harder circuits.

"Because everybody can do easy, right? We have to show we go where it matters," A2RL founder Aspire's engineering director Nicola Palarchi told WIRED. WIRED reports the crash data "can inform" perception, prediction, and control work, not that it has.