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- India
BBC Pop Up, the BBC's travelling bureau, is in India this month and hit the roads of Delhi to find the answer to the ultimate question: Is it faster to take an autorickshaw or call an Uber?
Read on for the verdict.
It all started when a student at a BBC Pop Up town hall meeting at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication earlier this week, told the team about how she got lost while riding in an Uber taxi.
On Wednesday afternoon, BBC Pop-Up's Matt Danzico and Vikas Pandey decided to put this to the test.
Matt called an Uber while Vikas hailed an autorickshaw. They agreed to race each other from Hailey Road in central Delhi to Karol Bagh in west Delhi.
At the beginning, both rivals seemed confident in their mode of transport:
But then, the contestants came head to head with Delhi's infamous traffic snarls:
But the autorickshaw driver had a trick up his sleeve.
Which led to this inevitable result:
The verdict: Autorickshaws are still the undisputable kings of Delhi's roads.
Kudos to Uber about being gracious in defeat though!
So why did the autorickshaw win?
Vikas Pandey says: "It just showed that auto drivers really know Delhi's alleys and bylanes and random destinations much better than GPS.
"It started out as fun, but became intense and actually felt like a Formula one race."
Matt Danzico reckons it was a battle of human versus robot brains in the end.
"This could happen only in a country like India where roads are still developed and GPS technology has not come far enough to understand developing spaces.
"It was really not a race between Uber and an autorickshaw. It was about GPS technology and old-school driver's brain."
Watch out for more on the race on video tomorrow.
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