The Best Autocross Car According to AI
The debate on what is the best autocross car has been going on since the sport has been invented. The proper choice of car is a matter of preference for the driver, but there is a baseline of good cars based on data and competition of results. As a team with a background in tech and software development, we were curious how an artificial intelligence would answer this question based on past data. Our goal is to see if AI provides us with a different answer to what we have seen before and help us come to a conclusion of what is the best autocross car.
So we fired up OpenAI’s ChatGPT and got to creating prompts to find our answer.
Dialing in the answer
We first started with asking the age-old question: What is the best autocross car
As you can see from the first screenshot, it wasn’t a very helpful answer initially. It just provided the obvious response of, “well, it depends.” Further down in the answer, we got a few suggestions of popular choices.
Miata, S2000, Mustang. These are popular choices, but nothing groundbreaking here.
To further improve on our answer, we prompted it with something more specific: What is the best autocross car based on results
As you can see, we got virtually the same “it depends” answer, but the recommended car list is more filled out.
While we have the usual suspects, we see the addition of the Corvette, Focus, and WRX. Still, this answer is not particularly unique, so let’s continue fine tuning.
We know that national results are the highest competition of autocross, so we can expect the AI’s answer to be more precise here.
Not too different of recommendations from before, but we see new mentions of Lotuses and the Porsche 911, both very competent autocross cars.
Choosing the best autocross car is not so straightforward because of the existence of different autocross classes. A Mazda Miata will not in the same class as a Chevrolet Corvette, which in turn will not be in the same class as a McLaren 720s. So for our final prompt, let’s improve our ask to include classes.
Let’s look at the recommendations for each SCCA class.
The AI does a formidable job of breaking down the best cars for each class. This list is comparable to Track Manual’s recommendations and our list of best autocross cars of 2023.
With this, let’s ask the AI to give us a single car to crown as the best autocross car across classes.
Tada! It’s the Miata. You might’ve heard this before, Miata is always the answer.
However, the AI isn’t perfect. For example, we do believe it’s unfairly biased against the legendary Toyota Sienna.
