were free to make as many laps as they could in the allotted time. Area B was mostly closed to spectators except for the start and finish, and involved the robots navigating a long suburban route demonstrating parking, navigation, and avoiding stalled cars along the way. Area B was part of the final event course. In Area C, robots performed several loops into two 4-way intersections in order to test their implementation of 4-way stops. Each loop, human drivers would provide a progressively more difficult intersection situation. At some points in Area C, roads would be blocked to test robots' ability to re-plan routes. On November 1, 2007 it was announced that there would be only 11 teams competing in the Urban Challenge. The 11 teams selected to compete were the following: AnnieWay Ben Franklin Team CarOLO Cornell Intelligent Vehicle Systems MIT Stanford Racing Tartan Racing Team Oshkosh Team UCF Victor Tango DARPA's reasoning for only qualifying 11 teams was primarily safety-related. DARPA felt that since there would be real humans near the robots in the traffic cars as well as DARPA officials scoring robot performance, safety was paramount. Teams were given sparsely defined waypoints charting the course for the robocars to follow. However, other teams generated a detailed map of the qualifications tracks. A debriefing published by one of the teams illustrated graphically the course it was given by DARPA contrasted against the course used by the winning team. Finals Starting Area: The final event for the DARPA Urban Challenge took place on November 3, 2007, and included all 11 teams which made it past the semi-final National Qualification Event. The event was broadcast on a live webcast via the DARPA Urban Challenge website, narrated by Marty Reid (racing sportscaster) and Grant Imahara (of MythBusters acclaim), with "sideline reporting" by Jamie Hyneman (also of Mythbusters). The final event consisted of three missions, approximately in total, given to each team. A team's score for each mission was computed by taking the total time taken to complete the mission, and adding and subtracting penalties and bonuses. Penalties were assessed for excessive delay, violating traffic rules, exhibiting dangerous behavior, etc. Vehicles were frequently manually paused for safety reasons; if a vehicle was not the root cause of such a pause then the duration of the pause was not counted in its final score. In order to officially complete the race, a vehicle's