Overall fuel economy: 8.4 L/100 km (28 mpg) on gasoline electric equivalent of 3.1 L/100 km (76 mpge) There’s a single MicroAutoBox brain and power supply and two other small computers.

Robby’s, in contrast, has plenty of room left over for luggage. Popping Bobby’s hatch, we find it full to bursting with computer gear. Miklos Kiss, Audi’s head of predevelopment for driver assistance systems, introduces us to his two autonomous brainchildren. I take to calling the newer car Robby the Robot, after the glass-skulled automaton from the 1956 sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet. And for good reason: The Audi weighs 400 kilograms (882 pounds) less than Bobby, the RS7 that holds the world speed record for autonomous cars, at 240 kilometers per hour (149 miles per hour). Robby is looking cool and confident in the pits at Parcmotor Castelloli, near Barcelona. It’s only a matter of time before governments and automakers pry the ignition keys out of our fallible, accident-prone hands for good. If a human driver can’t keep up, it occurs to me, then our obsolescence draws that much closer.

I’m about to take on Robby, the autonomous RS7 sport sedan that’s designed to rock a racetrack at speeds that would blister Google’s cartoonish bubble car. Here in Spain, the man-vs.-machine competition will be at higher speed and for higher stakes. Impressive stuff, though honestly, humans can hold their own at pulling into a rest stop. Audi’s autonomous cars are becoming quite the world travelers: Recall the much-ballyhooed first robotic drive from San Francisco to New York City, about a year ago.

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