As ASPIRE Gets Set To Stage A2RL 2025 In Abu Dhabi, CEO Stephane Timpano Shares What To Expect From The World’s Largest Autonomous Car Race

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Inc. Arabia speaks to ASPIRE CEO Stephane Timpano as the company gets set to stage A2RL 2025, the world's largest autonomous car race, in Abu Dhabi.

Transcript

00:00My name is Stefan Timpano, the CEO of Aspire and E2RL.

00:12Aspire is part of the Advanced Technology Research Council of Abu Dhabi.

00:17Our job is to foster innovation in the UAE and in Abu Dhabi.

00:21I like to call us the dark kitchen of research and development and innovation in the country.

00:27As a TRC, our job is to work on the most important technical problems that will support the development goals of the UAE and Abu Dhabi.

00:37Aspire has two main missions.

00:40The first one is to be the program manager of most of these projects that we developed with our sister's companies,

00:48TII, which is a research center, the biggest one in the region,

00:51and Venture One, which hosts all the startups, ventures that we create as a TRC.

00:57So that's the first job we do as Aspire.

00:59And the side job, which is where we are today, are the grand challenges.

01:03And the grand challenges are this program that we launched across several years,

01:08with a specific goal, which is a technical challenge that we want to help solve globally.

01:13And A2RL helps to do that in the space of autonomy, robotics, and AI,

01:19putting these three complex topics in motorsports, in racing, super complex environment, very high speed,

01:27and trying to adapt and to customize autonomy for these topics.

01:33So back 18 months ago, we had the first race.

01:41It was the first time ever at the time, for several reasons.

01:45First time in the UAE.

01:48First time we put together a human pilot, in this case a former Formula 1 pilot,

01:54against a machine.

01:56And first time we put multiple cars together on a track.

02:01And the first edition came with what happened a lot in industrial development.

02:06You fail, try to fail fast if you can, but you fail big sometimes.

02:10And you learn from your mistakes, you learn how to improve.

02:13And the first season was exactly that.

02:15Put together a technology that was not mature yet,

02:20with teams from all around the world with different backgrounds,

02:23and try to make that work all together.

02:25Outcome for us was amazing, because it was really what we were expecting.

02:29We learned a lot from that experience.

02:31For the grand public it was, wow, it's interesting, but what is behind that?

02:36So the 18, 19 months between the first race and the second race,

02:40we have worked on it.

02:41And we tried to learn from the mistakes, and try to tune the car,

02:46tune the autonomous kit, bring in the right teams.

02:49Most of them come from the first race.

02:52They come from all around the world.

02:53They are universities, research institutions.

02:57Some of them are racing teams that really do that every single day.

03:01And we put them on that competition together.

03:04We have worked a lot in helping them getting ready for this race through two main things.

03:10One is simulation.

03:11So we have created a sim racing context in which the teams have been competing,

03:16without having the risk of breaking the car and being able to fail very, very easily.

03:22Stand alone or with other teams.

03:24So they learn each other on these tracks.

03:27But we also worked a lot on the tracks.

03:30So we came a couple of times in Onlias Marina.

03:33October, since October, the teams have done something like 3,000 laps,

03:3810,000 kilometers, and 1.5 petabytes of data accumulated.

03:45This training helped us to get where we are today.

03:51All around the world, when you speak about technology,

03:54you need to have what we call test beds.

03:56Places where you can, at scale, test what we are doing.

04:00At scale, sometimes in a protected environment,

04:03and sometimes in a real-world environment.

04:05And if you don't do that, you can't really test what you are doing.

04:08This is what exactly we're doing with Z2R when it comes to advanced mobility.

04:12So today you already see autonomous taxis going around.

04:16Yas Marina, where we sit today, is one of the biggest test beds for autonomous taxis in the world.

04:22What we do here is not taxis, right?

04:25It's not a truck moving from A to B.

04:27It's six cars that are going to race on Saturday together at 250 kilometers per hour.

04:33The complexity of the circuit per se, the speed at which you go, is unseen.

04:38But this is the kind of experience you want to develop to then build up safer robotaxis,

04:44safer autonomous vehicles, because you need to have this extreme testing setting

04:51to test any scenario you wish and bring it to the real world.

04:56So what we're doing here is actually helping advancing the agenda of research in that field.

05:01Come to experience at A2RL, if you are here on Saturday, is the future of mobility.

05:08Is what being in a car will be going forward.

05:12It's giving you the sense that the technology will help you to be safer,

05:16but also to perform better and to get a totally different experience.

05:20It's a perfect experience.

05:21This is a perfect experience.

05:23For more information, it's a perfect experience.

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