Make an RC car drive itself with Donkeycar: media published by Donkeycar docs — Demo video on YouTube (opens in a new tab)Credit: Donkeycar docs

Make an RC car drive itself with Donkeycar

Wheeled, Medium

Donkeycar is a minimalist Python self-driving library for hobby RC cars: drive laps to collect data, train a neural net, and race autonomously.

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Used at high-school and university races. Includes a web controller, a training pipeline and a simulator.

Hardware & cost: A 1/16 RC car, Raspberry Pi or Jetson Nano, camera, PCA9685 servo driver. A few hundred dollars.

Difficulty: Medium.

Agent install prompt (paste into Claude Code, Cursor or Codex): "Install Donkeycar from https://github.com/autorope/donkeycar per docs.donkeycar.com, create a car app, and run it in the Donkey simulator first."

Source: autorope/donkeycar on GitHub — https://github.com/autorope/donkeycar (facts checked against the project README, Oct 2026; prices vary by region).

Quick answers

What do you need to make an RC car drive itself with Donkeycar?: A 1/16 RC car, Raspberry Pi or Jetson Nano, camera, PCA9685 servo driver. A few hundred dollars.
How hard is it to make an RC car drive itself with Donkeycar?: Medium.