Overland AI turns NASCAR team’s 6×6 military vehicle into a robot

Overland AI has released footage of a six-wheeled vehicle built by Richard Childress Racing’s manufacturing arm driving itself across rough ground while carrying a heavy load, the latest attempt by the Seattle company to show that its self-driving software can be fitted to vehicles it did not design.

The vehicle is the RCR 6WAP, short for 6-Wheeled Adaptable Platform, a 6×6 built by RCR Manufacturing Solutions, part of the business behind the NASCAR team. Overland AI said in a post on X on November 10 that the vehicle had been fitted with its OverDrive autonomy software and core sensing components, and that it navigated difficult terrain on its own despite the payload. The company did not say how much the vehicle was carrying, where the footage was filmed, how far it traveled, or whether a remote operator or safety driver was standing by.

“This is what we mean when we say we can make any vehicle autonomous,” Overland AI said in the post.

The 6WAP, which RCR also calls the Mothership, has spent much of the year on the defense show circuit. RCR brought the vehicle to the Modern Day Marine exhibition in Washington in April, after it had carried a launcher for Lockheed Martin’s Joint Air-to-Ground Missile, a precision-guided weapon normally fired from aircraft, during a demonstration in which the missile was fired straight up from the ground. In October, Parker Hannifin displayed MDH Strategic Services’ Airwolf counter-drone system mounted on the same vehicle at the Association of the U.S. Army conference. Overland AI now lists the 6WAP on its website as a six-wheel autonomous payload platform equipped with SPARK, its kit of sensors and computers that can be added to existing vehicles, for missions ranging from carrying drones to long-range fires.

Upfitting other companies’ vehicles is not new for Overland AI. In 2025 the company fitted its autonomy package to General Dynamics Land Systems’ Small Multipurpose Equipment Transport, a robotic mule that soldiers had previously steered with a tethered handheld controller, for the U.S. Army’s Project Convergence Capstone 5 exercise. The company has also integrated its software on Textron’s Ripsaw and Polaris’ RZR, and in April said it had installed OverDrive on a prototype of the U.S. Marine Corps’ Remotely Operated Ground Unit for Expeditionary Fires, an uncrewed launcher vehicle.

OverDrive grew out of the company’s work on DARPA’s Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency program, known as RACER, which tested high-speed off-road driving without GPS or preloaded maps. Overland AI-equipped vehicles took part in a DARPA demonstration in October in which autonomous ground vehicles worked with Anduril drones to locate and engage simulated targets, with a human approving each strike.

The company, founded in 2022 as a spinout from the University of Washington, also builds its own vehicles, including the 4×4 ULTRA and the newer IBEX unveiled in October. It raised $100 million in February to expand production, and in June said it had become the first ground autonomy company to prime a production contract for the U.S. military, under a Marine Corps ground-based air defense program. Defense One reported this month that the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment are spending nearly $25 million on more than a dozen IBEX vehicles.