Imagine driving at top speed on a steep, winding mountain pass in the Alps, or the Himalayas, or the Rocky Mountains.

Now, take your hands off the steering wheel and cover your eyes. Or grab a camera and take some pictures of the snowy mountain peaks. Or send a text message to a friend describing the scenery.

You'd skid off the road and plunge into a deep ravine within seconds, right?

Not if a group of graduate students at Stanford University can program the car to drive itself.

The mechanical engineering students are creating an autonomous ? or driverless ? car that they plan to race up and down the treacherous Pikes Peak highway in the Rocky Mountains next year.

The vehicle is the latest creation of a Stanford team, funded in part by Volkswagen, that in recent years has won awards for speed and manoeuvrability in competitions among unmanned cars.

More than an exercise

The students say programming a car to run by itself up a curving mountain road is more than simply an engineering exercise ? it's a way of creating and testing safety systems they hope one day will be used in all vehicles.

"If we can design a car that can autonomously go up Pikes Peak, we can design a car that can take over when a driver falls asleep," said Kirstin Talvala, one of the students.

The car being programmed for the mountain run is an Audi TTS. It has been named "Shelley" in homage to former French rally driver Michele Mouton, who in 1985 became the first woman to win the Pikes Peak race in Colorado.

156 turns

Shelley would not be the first autonomous car to climb Pikes Peak, a challenging 20-kilometre ascent that includes 156 turns and ends more than 4300 metres above sea level.

But those earlier unmanned cars went at about 40km/h, while the Stanford team plans to run Shelley ? whose top speed in the desert is 208km/h ? at close to race speed.

Winning drivers in the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, which has been run each summer since 1916, have come close to breaking the 10-minute mark in recent years.

Japan's Nobuhiro Tajima has won the last four years, while earlier winners have included American Mario Andretti.

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