PAHRUMP, NEVADA—You could hear Porsches, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis roaring across the desert—or, more specifically, Spring Mountain Motor Resort, a scorching-hot racetrack about 60 miles west of Las Vegas. I was driving a Porsche GT3 RS with Jamie Wall, a professional racecar driver and McLaren coach, beside me—and it handled a bit differently than the 1997 Toyota Camry I’ve owned for the past 18 years.

“I bet it’s a fair bit faster, too,” Wall laughed.

As we set out across the winding road course, our goal, technically, was loftier than just having fun: We were acquiring data that could help fuel and inform autonomous vehicles.