DARPA's Self-Driving Cars All Failed in 2004 — Now Waymo Does 450,000 Rides a Week

Key Takeaways

• •First DARPA Grand Challenge (March 13, 2004): no vehicle completed the 142-mile desert course
• •Stanford's 'Stanley' won the second challenge in 2005 — Sebastian Thrun went on to launch Google's self-driving project
• •Waymo spun out of Google in 2016 and has logged over 200 million autonomous miles
• •By 2026, Waymo operates in 10 metro areas with 450,000+ rides per week

Timeline

On March 13, 2004, fifteen autonomous vehicles lined up in the Mojave Desert near Barstow, California. DARPA — the Pentagon's research agency, the same organization that funded the internet — had offered a $1 million prize to any vehicle that could complete a 142-mile course through the desert without a human driver.

Every single vehicle failed.

The best performer, Carnegie Mellon's Sandstorm, made it 7.4 miles before getting stuck on a rock. Several vehicles never made it past the starting area. One caught fire. The course, across rough desert terrain with obstacles, turns, and tunnels, was beyond anything the technology could handle.

The media called it a disaster. DARPA called it a beginning.

The best vehicle in the 2004 DARPA Challenge covered 7.4 miles before getting stuck on a rock. Today's Waymo fleet drives 450,000 rides a week without a human touching the wheel.

They doubled the prize to $2 million and held a second challenge in October 2005. This time, five vehicles completed the course. The winner was Stanford's 'Stanley,' a modified Volkswagen Touareg led by a German-born AI researcher named Sebastian Thrun. Stanley completed the 132-mile course in 6 hours and 53 minutes.

Thrun's approach was different from competitors who relied heavily on pre-programmed GPS waypoints. Stanley used machine learning — the car's LIDAR sensors scanned the terrain ahead, and algorithms trained on the data from the desert adapted in real time. The car learned the desert as it drove through it.

Google noticed. In 2009, the company hired Thrun to launch its self-driving car project, which became the most ambitious autonomous vehicle program in history. Google's cars racked up millions of test miles on public roads — the first time autonomous vehicles left controlled environments and drove alongside regular traffic.

In 2016, the project spun out as Waymo, an independent company under Alphabet. The transition from research project to commercial service took years of patient engineering. Sensors improved. Algorithms matured. The car learned to handle rain, construction zones, jaywalking pedestrians, and the chaos of real-world driving.

The 22-year arc from 'every car failed in the desert' to '450,000 rides per week' is one of the most important technology stories of the 21st century.

By February 2025, Waymo had logged over 200 million autonomous miles. By early 2026, Waymo operates robotaxi services in 10 metropolitan areas and completes more than 450,000 rides per week — all without a human safety driver in the vehicle.

The Lucid-Nuro-Uber partnership announced at CES 2026 plans to deploy 20,000 autonomous robotaxis over six years, starting in San Francisco. The autonomous vehicle has entered its scaling phase.

The 22-year arc from the Mojave Desert disaster to half a million weekly rides is not a story of sudden breakthroughs. It's a story of incremental progress — a thousand small improvements compounding over two decades. Better sensors. Better algorithms. Better maps. Better edge-case handling. Each year, the cars got slightly smarter, slightly more capable, slightly more reliable.

The root of autonomous driving isn't Silicon Valley. It's Ernst Dickmanns, a German aerospace engineer who, in 1986, equipped a Mercedes van with cameras and processors at Bundeswehr University Munich. His VaMoRs project drove itself on empty highways at 60 mph using computer vision. Nobody outside academia paid attention.

Dickmanns proved the concept. DARPA turned it into a competition. Stanford won. Google scaled it. Waymo commercialized it. The self-driving car took 40 years and a failed desert race to get here.

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