Tech Workers Hooked ChatGPT Up to a Toyota Corolla; Only GPT-6 Finished the Course
soumitrashukla9 · x · 2026-09-30
Per 404 Media, a Bay Area trio calling themselves DrivingBench connected frontier LLMs to a Toyota Corolla, giving them direct control of steering, throttle, and brakes on a cone course in a public parking lot — to test whether untrained, off-the-shelf chatbots can drive a real car.
Results were mixed: Grok 4.6, GPT-5.6 Sol, and Claude Fable 5.1 drove only a few meters and failed to finish, while GPT-6 Astra eventually learned to navigate and complete the course after plenty of troubleshooting. The team — Aditya Ramabadran, Tobias Gessler, and Simon Mahns of AI math startup Axiom Math — got the idea hanging out at an ice cream shop, and has posted their code, prompts, and videos online.
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