The first global autonomous car racing championship will start in 2016, the creators of Formula E have announced.
Known as RoboRace, the series will see completely autonomous electric cars compete in one-hour races designed to test artificial intelligence.
Races, which will take place on the same day and circuits as the Formula E championship, will have 10 teams and 20 cars competing.
"In terms of technology we're trying to make them better than humans. So it means we expect the cars will have high acceleration and high speeds," Denis Sverdlov, from Kinetik, the company that will make all the cars, told WIRED.
"Even if the first race isn't going to be as high-speed as the current one can do, it is still going to be a huge achievement."
He said the cars would have top speeds of "more than 300kph (186mph)", but added they were still in the early stages of development. The races will see the electric battery-powered cars competing against each other for one hour.
The concept of the car has already been developed and will be "very different" to the designs of current race cars. There are also no safety issues for humans as the autonomous cars will be on the existing fenced-off race tracks used for Forumla E.
Development of all the vehicles taking part in the championship will be handled by Kinetik, which has already developed electric trucks for UK roads. Individual companies competing will be tasked with creating their own algorithms and artificial intelligence to get the cars around the tracks.
Sverdlov told WIRED that his company had already created the initial software that will power the cars: "We've created the first version of the APIs, so the teams can start to use the APIs to do their algorithms and use the simulations to see how it works."
Preston said autonomous racing will be exciting at the beginning as there will be mistakes and things will go wrong, plus the 'personality' that exists with current drivers will move to the teams and engineers.