After all points were tallied, Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Racing was the winner of this year's DARPA Grand Challenge. In second place was Stanford, with Virginia Tech in third. As podium finishers, the teams will receive $2 million, $1 million and $500,000, respectively. Currently, there are no plans for a fourth challenge, and murmurings from DARPA staff are that autonomous-vehicle development has reached a point such that it no longer needs seed money to flourish and evolve further. Hopefully they're wrong though, because the Grand Challenge a great event and tremendous motivation for public imagination. Maybe the teams will just bathe in Cristal tonight. – Curtis Walker

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