Google's Autonomous Car Passes 2 Million Miles

Google said today it recently reached a huge milestone with its autonomous cars. Its cars have logged its two-millionth mile. To put into perspective, Google's self-driving cars have travelled roughly 300 years of human driving. The first million miles took Google six years, the second million came in at 16 months. Recode evaluates how far Google's self-driving cars have come. It notes that Google has been involved in 14 of such incidents, 13 of which were caused by other drivers.

Comments

A different perspective...

[mspohr]

Tesla has collected over a billion miles of driving data (about 180 million on autopilot) and adds a million miles every 10 hours.

Re:Bad Comparison!

[mspohr]

I do realize that the Google cars have a higher level of automated driving, more sensors, etc. (and also some severe limitations on speed, locations, weather, etc.).
However, the object is to collect as much driving data as possible to see how the car behaves in different situations. In that case, total distance matters and Tesla is way ahead of anyone else. Tesla cars collect data even when AP is not switched on which is valuable to see how a human driver handles various road environments.

This highlights a fundamental difference between Google and Tesla. Google is approaching the problem from the point of view that they have to develop a complete system that does everything. Tesla is taking an incremental approach by introducing a low level of autonomous driving with human supervision and then letting the collected data drive continuous improvements. We'll see which approach is best as time goes on.