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Waymo racks up 4 million self-driven miles
Waymo continues to press its lead in terms of actual miles driven on roads, which is potentially the most important metric out there when it comes to building successful autonomous driving technology. The Alphabet-owned company that began life as Google's self-driving car project around a decade ago now has 4 million miles driven autonomously on roads.
That 4 million miles represents the self-driving effort of Waymo's entire test fleet, covering its original autonomous vehicles all the way up to its current driverless Chrysler Pacifica minivans, which are actually now testing on Arizona public roads, right alongside everyday human drivers, with no safety driver behind the wheel at all.
In simulations, Waymo's bots have driven 2.5 billion "virtual miles".
Also at The Verge.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday December 01 2017, @02:41PM (1 child)
200 miles per day - in a city? That's a lot of driving. And, probably pointless driving. You do realize that a lot of city dwellers may not drive 200 miles in a month? A hundred miles in city traffic is a much longer drive than someone like me, who can decide that he wants to go to Dallas, or Tulsa, and just run down the interstate, or going north, hop on a primary highway for several miles, then get on the turnpike the rest of the way.
If they're running autonomous vehicles in Phoenix, I certainly HOPE there is some point to the running. Carry people to work, school, doctor's office, shopping, whatever, not just drive around for the sake of racking up miles.
(Score: 1) by galgon on Saturday December 02 2017, @04:12AM
NYC cabs run about 200 miles a day. Phoenix is a larger city and likely more miles per trip on average. If they were using these like an Uber they could easily do 200 miles a day. Unfortunately they are still trialing them with a small group of test families. Hopefully they open it up to the public soon.