The autonomous vehicle that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge was Stanley.
Stanley was a robotic Volkswagen Touareg developed by Stanford University’s autonomous-vehicle team, led by Sebastian Thrun. It completed the 132-mile desert course in Nevada in 6 hours, 54 minutes, winning the competition and its two-million-dollar prize. The vehicle used cameras, radar, laser sensors, GPS, and onboard computing to follow the route without a human controlling the steering or pedals.
The 2005 event was a major advance over the first DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004, when no vehicle completed the course. Stanley’s success demonstrated that autonomous navigation could work over long, difficult outdoor routes rather than only in controlled laboratories.
Stanley was not a production self-driving car and did not operate with today’s consumer-driver-assistance features. Its achievement was a research milestone that helped launch later autonomous-vehicle programs at universities and technology companies.