The competition was staged at an unused military based in Victorville, a California town 120 kilometers (75 miles) northeast of Los Angeles, and promises a first-place prize of two million dollars.

Cars and trucks with electronic brains, sensors, radar and other sophisticated gear crafted to eliminate the need for humans at steering wheels had to maneuver 100 kilometers along mock city streets in less than six hours.

The event began with mechanics, one-by-one, moving the eleven competitors to the starting line. At the fateful moment, drivers abandoned the vehicles, which began moving on their own, eliciting cheers from thousands of spectators.

The cars picked up pace as they found their way along streets of the closed-down base without any help. Forty other cars, driven by people, set out with the robot vehicles to simulate city traffic.

Teams that qualified to be in the "DARPA Challenge" include those from prestigious US universities such as Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Virginia Tech, where 33 people were slaughtered in a tragic shooting spree in April.

"There's more computing power in the back than most companies have," MIT team leader Paul Barrett told AFP while describing technology that went into their modified Land Rover. "It's like all the PCs in your company".

From one to 1.5 tons of equipment, including 17 radar units, was added to the Land Rover, according to Barrett.

Nearby was an entry built with more modest means by students at a Florida university that overhauled a used 1996 Subaru station wagon.

"What we had was the old car of the wife of one of our engineers," said Florida team member Ben Patz.

"We invested 150,000 dollars in hardware, and between 5,000 and 10,000 hours of word, but that's free manpower."

Only seven contenders remained by late morning, and it was Stanford's Volkswagen Passat, nicknamed "Junior," that crossed the finish line first.

A colossal Chevrolet Tahoe engineered by a team from Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania and backed with money from automotive giant General Motors finished second.

Virginia Tech's four-by-four Ford took third place.

Finishing first does not guarantee victory because speed is one of several criteria used to determine who will be the champion and get the prize money.

DARPA also rates competitors for precision and performance while navigating the 100-kilometer course. The winner of the DARPA Challenge will be announced Sunday morning.

Five cars dropped out of the race, meaning the rally crown could be awarded to any of the six finishers, which include MIT, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania.

One million dollars will be awarded to the second-place finisher and 500,000 dollars to third place.

The US military hopes to be the real winner at the DARPA Challenge by fostering technology enabling it to make a third of its vehicles robotic by 2015. The US Congress has sanctioned the goal.

The US Department of Defense hopes using robotic vehicles devoid of people will save soldiers from being killed by roadside bombs or other attacks in urban battlefields.

Roadside bombs have killed hundreds of soldiers in Iraq since the US invaded that country in 2003.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Challenge is the third such annual competition since it began in 2004 but the first to take place in a simulated city setting.

A Stanford team won last year when the course was across open desert in the US state of Nevada.

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