Thirteen vehicles lined up last March to race across the Mojave Desert , seeking a million in prize money . To win , they had to finish the 142-mile race in less than 10 hours . Teams and watchers knew there might be no winner at all , because these vehicles were missinge a key part drivers . DARPA , the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency , organized the race as part of a push to develop robotic vehicles for future battlefields . But the Grand Challenge , as it was called , just proved how difficult it is to get a car to speed across an unfamiliar desert without human guidance . One had its brake lock up in the starting area . Another began by throwing itself onto a wall . Another got tied up by bushes near the road after 1.9 miles . One turned upside down . One took off in entirely the wrong direction and had to be disabled by remote  control . One went a little more than a mile and rushed into a fence ; another managed to go for six miles but stuck on a rock . The "winner," if there was any , reached 7.8 miles before it ran into a long , narrow hole , and the front wheels caught on fire . "You get a lot of respect for natural abilities of the living things," says Reinhold Behringer , who helped design two of the car-size vehicles for a company called Sci-Autonics . "Even ants   can do all these tasks effortlessly . It's very hard for us to put these abilities into our machines ." The robotic vehicles , though with necessary modern equipment such as advanced computers and GPS guidance , had trouble figuring out fast enough the blocks ahead that a two-year-old human recognizes immediately , Sure , that very young child, who has just only learned to walk , may not think to wipe apple juice off her face , but she already knows that when there's a cookie in the kitchen she has to climb up the table , and that when she gets to the cookie it will taste good . She is more advanced , even months old , than any machine humans have designed . In the race , the greatest distance one robotic vehicle covered was_.
about eight miles six miles almost two miles about one mile